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ASTRONOMY
Departure of long-term advocate adds to the woes of the financially troubled radio telescope.
Physicist Robert Kerr uses irony to describe the first hint of trouble: "Radio quiet," he calls it. After four years as director of the Arecibo Observatory, home to the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, he says that he was suddenly out of the loop: contacts at both the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the observatory, and SRI International, the contractor that runs it, stopped returning his e-mails and phone calls.
After a month of silence, Kerr was stripped of his role as the observatory's principal investigator. Shortly afterward, he resigned from his other post, as operations director.
Kerr traces his departure to a disagreement over a possible windfall for the Puerto Rico observatory. In late July, he publicly criticized the NSF for planning to cut its contribution to Arecibo if the facility began to take payments for helping in a private survey looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. NSF officials say that his assertions are inaccurate and that its communication with Kerr never lapsed.
Whatever the facts, some Arecibo observers see Kerr's exit as an ill-timed loss for a storied, but financially threatened, scientific facility that faces a murky future.
"Somebody's going to have to be the person actively trying to figure this out," says Michael Nolan, a former Arecibo director now at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Bob was that person. Without him, I don't know what their plan is."
The drama surrounding Kerr's departure is in keeping with the scale of Arecibo, which has a bowl-shaped reflector that measures 305 metres across and is the world's most sensitive radio telescope. At Arecibo, researchers...