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Northern lights: The Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, which is to become the seat of a new National Astronomy Technology Centre. Credit: ROYAL OBSERVATORY, EDINBURGH/SPL

The Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO), currently based in Cambridge, is to close and merge with the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, with the loss of up to a hundred jobs from both sites. But British astronomy will gain from savings of at least £2.4 million (US$4 million) a year for the next four years, and £4 million a year thereafter. The merged site will be renamed the Astronomy Technology Centre.

The decision ends 15 years of uncertainty over the future of the two royal observatories. It was greeted with relief by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), which runs the two sites. The move is expected to take place in July 1998.

But staff at the RGO, as well as the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, say they are “devastated” and will “fight the decision all the way”. They believe the decision is a huge loss to British science and a blow to Britain's international standing in astronomy. Rees, who campaigned for both sites to remain open, says the savings will be heavily outweighed by the loss of both an historic observatory and an “excellent” modern scientific institution.

A survey of Britain's astronomers conducted by the Royal Astronomical Society earlier this year, however, showed that most believed one of the two sites had to go. This was also the view of the directors of both sites, and the society's president, Malcolm Longair, believes the decision was the right one.

Ken Pounds, chief executive of PPARC, says the savings come at a time when British astronomy is going through one of the most cash-starved periods it has known. If the merger had not happened, he says, the research council would have been compelled to make savage cuts to grants to university astronomy research programmes.

Meanwhile the name of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which was founded in 1675, will almost certainly remain, and could return to its original site next to the Thames in south London, where its former building is now a museum.

The decision to close the Cambridge site was announced last week by the science minister, John Battle, and was taken on the advice of PPARC (see Nature 387, 646; 1997). Pounds says the council could not afford to maintain two institutions essentially performing the same function — providing technical support to Britain's telescopes in the Canary Islands and Hawaii.

PPARC's predecessor, the Science and Engineering Research Council, had wanted to merge the observatories at Edinburgh 15 years ago. But this was considered too politically sensitive at the time, says Pounds. A later panel voted to move the RGO to Cambridge in 1990 on the strength of possible collaboration between the RGO and the University of Cambridge's highly regarded astronomy facilities.

In 1995 a review panel on UK millimetre, optical and infrared astronomy again decided to merge the centres. That review was chaired by James Hough, head of the department of physical sciences at the University of Hertfordshire. But its plans were put on hold when the previous Conservative government launched its ‘prior options’ initiative inviting competitive bids from the private sector to manage UK research facilities.

A new panel was convened after the May general election, this time chaired by Brian Eyre, deputy chairman of AEA Technology plc. This panel unanimously came to essentially the same conclusion. Eyre says there was little to choose between the two sites. Edinburgh was chosen because it offered the right mix of skills for PPARC programmes.

But RGO staff strongly disagree. David Carter, who runs the RGO's telescope design consultancy jointly with Liverpool John Moores University, says Edinburgh does not have the same expertise in telescope design as Cambridge. He fears these skills will be lost overseas. He doubts whether staff will want to relocate to Edinburgh given the recent move to Cambridge from the RGO's former home in East Sussex.

Andy Lawrence, professor of astronomy at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the management board at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, agrees that Cambridge possesses superior design skills. But he says that PPARC chose Edinburgh because its superior instrumentation skills will be more useful now that the United Kingdom's last big telescope project that needed design input, the twin 8-metre Gemini, is nearing completion.

The RGO left its Greenwich site 50 years ago, moving to East Sussex after the Second World War to escape the streetlights and smog of London, then to Cambridge. It won the race to fix longitude at sea, established the meridian, and set Greenwich Mean Time as the international standard.