Official word on Arecibo:
So, NSF met with Arecibo people today, I am told, and the new management consortium will be putting out an official press release real soon, was waiting for the internal communication to be done.
I was asked to put up the following (lightly edited):
"Please allow me to clear up a potential point of confusion. There
should be no doubt in anyone's mind that Arecibo will continue to
be a premier facility for astronomy.
NSF will formally announce the result of the Arecibo management
recompetition on Monday. The proposal led by SRI was formulated
by a team that included the Universities Space Research
Association (USRA; www.usra.edu) and Puerto Rico's Universidad
Metropolitana, with USRA taking the lead for managing Arecibo's
astronomy and planetary radar programs.
... [we are] committed, as is the
entire SRI-led team, to ensuring Arecibo's continued vitality as
an astronomy facility for many years to come. USRA (a
not-for-profit corporation) has been managing research
institutions -- including SOFIA, NASA's airborne IR observatory
-- for the U.S. government for more than 40 years. [we]
vouch for USRA's commitment to the welfare of its
people and to meeting the needs of the communities it serves."
In practical terms, I suspect the immediate question will be about staffing - what
the new staff levels will be, who will be retained on site and the new management
(I hear they have a top person for Deputy Director...)
In the medium term, the question is how much the emphasis will shift back to Arecibo old radar function, and how much astronomy time there will be, given reduced NSF AST funding committment.
And minutiae like how proposal calls and selections will be handled etc & so forth.
Life goes on, some things change.