San Diego

On the brink: proposals to keep Kitt Peak's 12-metre telescope open have been rejected. Credit: SPL

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that it will no longer fund operation of the 12-metre telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona — raising the likelihood that the historic instrument will finally shut down.

The funding agency has told the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that their proposal to operate the telescope for $2.4 million for three years was being rejected because of a tightening NSF budget.

Owned by the NSF since it opened in 1967, the telescope is the only facility in the United States for millimetre-wavelength radio astronomy that is fully open to outside researchers.

The University of Arizona has been operating the telescope since last July, when the NSF said that it would no longer bear the operation costs on a permanent basis. The Tucson-based Research Corporation stepped in with philanthropic funds for interim operations while a new NSF grant was sought.

Reviewers of the proposal to the NSF gave the project high marks, Arizona officials say, but NSF administrators said money was not available given the Bush administration's budget proposal.

“We are simply dumbfounded,” says Peter Strittmatter, director of Arizona's Steward Observatory and leader of the grant proposal to the NSF. “The importance of the telescope to the US astronomy community was clearly recognized by all the reviewers.”

The University of Arizona will now begin a search for alternative funding to try to keep the telescope open for the 100-plus astronomers that use it. “We will keep our shoestring operation going” while trying to find groups to guarantee purchase of time on the telescope, says Strittmatter.