Budget Cuts to Pull Plug on Radio Observatory

A unique deep-space observatory near here that listens for radio waves from the edge of time in a search for unidentified celestial objects is about to go out of business, for want of a worldly $400,000.

Astronomers at the 25-year-old Clark Lake Radio Observatory say they are frustrated by the news because discoveries by the facility have not only advanced man’s knowledge of the universe but, in more practical applications, have improved military over-the-horizon radar systems.

“To shut down this observatory would be a crime because there’s absolutely nothing else like this in the world that can do anything near what this one can do,” said M.J. (Mike) Mahoney, resident director of the observatory.

The facility’s owner, the University of Maryland, notified Mahoney and his three fellow scientists this week that because of cutbacks by the National Science Foundation, which funds the observatory, there will be no money to operate the observatory after April 26. Besides the four scientists, two maintenance workers normally staff the observatory, but those jobs have gone unfilled as an economy measure.

The university itself has no money to help pay the observatory’s $400,000 annual operating expenses, said Michael A’Hearn, acting director of the university’s astronomy program at College Park, Md.

“The cost of operating that observatory is a significant fraction of operating our entire astronomy department,” he said. “We have no internal resources to allow it (Clark Lake) to operate.”

Bill Erickson, director of the observatory, said he is soliciting contributions from California corporations to keep the facility open. The problem, he said, is that “a lot of those kinds of major contributions are arranged on the golf course, rather than by bearded scientists walking in off the street.”

“We attempted to get more money from Maryland, but the problem is geographical. The university is timid in approaching the governor and the legislature in Maryland for money for a facility in California,” Erickson said. “Maryland doesn’t want to put its money in California.”

And, Erickson said, there isn’t much prospect of another university taking over the observatory’s operations.

“We’re open to that, but other universities are financially hurting as well and are not likely to take on another obligation,” he said.

Erickson and Mahoney held out some hope that a U.S. Navy contract with the observatory may extend the facility’s life, albeit only for months, not years.

Unlike the better-known optical telescopes with mirrors, such as the ones atop Palomar Mountain that collect the short-length light waves, the Clark Lake Radio Observatory collects the longer radio waves with an array of 720 antennas, each 26 feet tall, that stretch across the desert floor in the shape of a giant T, nearly two miles long and one mile wide.

The Clark Lake Observatory is the only facility outside the Soviet Union collecting signals from the lowest part of the radio spectrum that are able to penetrate the earth’s ionosphere, and is said to be far better than its Russian counterpart.

The observatory complements other radio observatories in the world that collect higher-frequency radio signals, as well as facilities that collect optical, X-ray, ultraviolet and infrared waves, Mahoney said.

“When you do astronomy, you want to get information from every part of the electromagnetic spectrum because each one is a different window into space, and the more information you receive from each, the more you can understand the whole picture of what is out there,” he said. “There are some objects in space you can detect with an optical telescope but not on ours, and some that you can detect only through our antennas. In the past year, we have seen objects that no other telescope in the world has been able to detect.”

Some of those objects are 15 billion light-years away--literally at the edge of space and time, Mahoney said.

“We have spent more than a decade building this instrument, and in the past two years it has become very productive for us,” he said. “We are in the middle of surveying the sky and are receiving 100 times more radio detections than any previous survey of that same frequency range. If, in science, you can do something two times better, you get excited; if you do something 10 times better, you get very excited. We’re doing things 100 times better, which is more than one could hope.

“It doesn’t make any sense to us that now we have to turn it off and walk away from it--especially since it took us 20 years to get to this point.”

The Navy is interested in the observatory’s work because the facility has conducted research on the ionosphere, the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere, which has a role in the effectiveness of over-the-horizon radar.

The Borrego Springs scientists have discovered, for instance, that there are traveling ionospheric disturbances, called “ionocoustic waves,” that propagate through the ionosphere, changing the height of its different layers. That can distort radar readings.

Erickson said there is no doubt within the scientific community about the value of the facility.

“Scientists around the nation recognize the importance of our work, and we’ve got their letters to prove it,” he said. “But the problem is, their letters don’t cash very well at the bank.”

He said that while $400,000 may seem like an insignificant amount of money for scientific research, the National Science Foundation has allocated only $8 million for extragalactic astronomy, $5 million for the study of our own galaxy, and $1.2 million for the study of our solar system.

Mahoney said the observatory cannot simply be mothballed for a year and reopened because the equipment needs constant maintenance.

“Astronomy has been waiting for years for a place like this,” he said. “I can’t believe we can’t find a few hundred thousand dollars to keep an instrument like this operating. I wish I could get on a podium and scream and shout that someone is making a mistake.”