$1.6 BILLION IN FUNDING AWARDED TO THIRTY METER TELESCOPE - OR NOT?
Science.org - February 28, 2024
U.S. astronomers will have to make do with one giant ground-based telescope rather than the desired two, the National Science Board (NSB) announced yesterday.
Meeting last week, the panel of scientists that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF) capped the budget of the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP) at $1.6 billion, enough for a substantial share in one 30-meter class telescope. But US-ELTP represents the interests of two such projects—the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii—which are building components but not fully funded. The board has given NSF until May to come up with a process to choose the lucky winner....
So in 2018 the two projects joined forces as US-ELTP and made a joint offer to NSF: a share in both telescopes that would give U.S. astronomers two complementary giant instruments covering both hemispheres, something that Europe’s Extremely Large Telescope, rapidly taking shape in Chile, could not do.
NSF carried out preliminary design reviews on both projects, which the agency approved in early 2023, but the estimated costs continued to balloon. Each telescope now has a price tag approaching $3 billion, which would make just one of them the costliest project NSF had ever undertaken. In an editorial in Science in November 2023, Turner argued that insisting that NSF fund two telescopes put both projects at risk.
At its meeting on 22 February, NSB acknowledged the ambition and vision of the US-ELTP proposal but noted it would take up 80% of NSF’s funding for major projects. As NSB could not condone starving other fields, it set the $1.6 billion cap and tasked NSF with setting out a plan for choosing a telescope and its subsequent timeline by the board’s next meeting in May.
