UK announced it is withdrawing from Gemini
The Gemini twin telescopes, one in the "north" on Hawaii, and one south in Chile, are one of the few major (8-10m) optical/near-infrared telescope facilities.
The telescopes are a joint US (NSF national), UK, Canada, Chile, Australia, Argentina and Brazil effort, and are a major project, with multi-million dollar operating costs, hundreds of million dollar capital costs, and tens of million of dollars in instrumentation existing and under development.
Earlier this month, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the heir to the old PPRAC which succeeded ye olde SERC, announced they were quitting.
This kinda blindsided the partners.
The UK is a 23% partner, with 30 million pound capital investment and 4 million pound annual operational contribution.
That is real money, at the current exchange rate that is like eight gazillion dollars.
The remaining partners are going to have some difficulty, to say the least, in coming up with that sort of money to keep going. Best bet would be seek out new partners (South Korea anyone?) if anyone is buying. I hear it is going to be a tough shopping season...
Of course the eight million pound fine the UK will pay for its withdrawal will help tide things over, and the cancellation of the UK instrument projects.
Which is double weird, since the UK could renegotiate its contribution in 2012, so really they are only saving 2-3 years of operating expenses.
STFC was supposed to confirm this decision last week, but last I heard the NSF had not actually heard anything from them.
Probably cut their phone service to save some money.
This is triply weird, because the UK was supposed to be significantly increasing its contribution to science and research. Apparently the multi-year increases announced didn't include inflation adjusted future costs, or something. And then they gave it all to bio anyway... ?
As noted in the Grauniad blog comments, this has been coming ever since the UK joined ESO and its Very Large Telescopes.
It does leave the UK short in the North - except for the li'l old Isaac Newton Group telescopes in the Canaries.
'Course we've all known since the Anglo-Australian Telescope that the Northern sky is kinda boring, even if the Southern constellations are more twee
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No, we Brits don't need science! We can move money symbols around and make money that way, lending to all and sundry.
Oh, wait...
Wait for George Bush to weigh in. Will he want Gemini to find its own funding in industry? As this is basic research, the headwaters of applied research, that thinking is worse than suicidal, it is homicidal.
There has been a perception that Gemini has never performed up to its expectations. I had a conversation with an anonymous British astronomer (who was serving on some committee having to do with big telescopes and the UK) who thought that Gemini was misdesigned and badly run at the beginning.
ESO has been doing very well for itself, I know a lot of American astronomers who feel that it has been "eating our lunch".
The NSF senior review had some negative language about Gemini as well. I don't think that ESO would let NOAO join, though.
So fucking typical; the government used to be run by Oxbridge classicists who knew nothing about science or technology, now it's run by Oxbridge lawyers and MBAs who know nothing about science and technology and don't have the imagination to realise it might be important.
The Guardian blog link points to the gemini web site, and hunting around the grauniad website is not turning up the discussion - could you repost the link, please?
Cheers,
Matt (who'll go back to lurking now)
grr. fixed. thanks.
ye olde cut'n'paste was so much smoother on vanilla x11 guis
One of the reasons Gemini is as it is, is that it was saddled with a overly complicated structure to be all things to all of the partners. I mean a bureaucratic structure, not a telescope structure, although if you ever read the instrument design requirements you might think it is both. (This is my opinion, blissfully unmarred by personal knowledge of the facts or process.) Having participated in the early stages of Gemini and helped make it what it is today, the UK, and anonymous senior British astronomers for all I know, seem to have decided to take their money and play with the VLT instead. That's understandable from a pure self-interest point of view, but whinging about the Gemini they helped create while screwing over the remaining partners should not get much sympathy.