Money Woes Cloud Future of Workhorse U.S. Telescopes

摘要

Five federally funded optical and radio telescopes in the United States could be forced to shut down over the next 3 years because of budget cuts by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The anticipated closures-all but certain unless alternate sources of funding materialize-will leave astronomers at institutions that lack their own telescopes out in the cold. No publicly accessible optical telescopes, and just one public-access radio telescope, would be left in the continental United States.