阿雷西博射电天文台资金危机（译自官方博客）
翻译：中国分布式总站原帖：
http://www.equn.com/forum/thread-17021-1-1.html
Arecibo 的资金危机 (翻译自官方Blog)
一个多月前的帖子，大致翻译一下，可以了解一些相关的情况。
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=42353
Posted 14 Sep 2007 18:02:21 UTC
As some people noted in other parts of the forums, there was an article in the Washington Post this weekend about the crisis in NSF funding for the Arecibo Observatory (and, perhaps, radio astronomy in general.) I just want to let everyone know that we are aware of the situation and are planning to fight for Arecibo's future.
华盛顿邮报的一篇文章提到了 NSF 对 Arecibo 观测站的资助危机。项目方是清楚这个情况的，并且正为 Arecibo 的未来而努力。
Dan and some others that I work with were in Washington this week attending a meeting to discuss the scientific future of Arecibo. The observatory does have unique capabilities, primarily because of its size. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) currently has 42 dishes (not all have yet been operational), but the combined collecting area of those dishes is about 1.5% of the area of the Arecibo telescope. If ATA is able to get funding for an additional 40 dishes that will be 3% of the Arecibo collecting area. Even at the initially proposed 300 dishes (which won't happen any time soon) it is a small fraction of the collecting area of Arecibo. ATA's power comes from being able to focus in on smaller areas of the sky, which makes it an excellent instrument for looking for signals from specific stars, but inappropriate for surveys of large sky areas like SETI@home. Only when the Square Kilometer Array is fully operational (scheduled for 2020, but who knows) will Arecibo's capability be surpassed.
Arecibo 主要特殊之处在于它独一无二的尺寸。ATA 目前有42个天线，其中部分还不可用，但组合起来的尺寸仅相当于 Arecibo 的1.5%。即使达到提议中的300个天线（短期内是不可能实现的），仍然远远比不上 Arecibo。另外，ATA 的主要优点是可以专注于天空中的小块区域，适合于寻找特定星体的信号，却就不适合于像 SETI@home 这种需要对大范围的天空区域进行搜索的项目。而唯一能替代 Arecibo 的 SKA 至少也要到 2020 年才能正式运行。
译注：ATA 就是前些时间微软创始人之一 Paul Allen 捐钱搞的那个天线阵列。
What led us to this funding problem? Primarily a combination of flat budgets for astronomy research and expensive new instruments. The National Science Foundation budget for Astronomy is about $200 million dollars per year, and prior to this year, the budget for Arecibo was about $10 million. Neither of those numbers are chump change, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. If the NSF doesn't get a budget increase for Astronomy and doesn't close some facilities, there will be a $30 million dollar shortfall, so Arecibo isn't the only facility in trouble.
资金问题的主要原因是天文类研究项目的总预算不足。NSF 在这方面的预算大概是每年2亿美元，而 Arecibo 的预算大概是1千万美元。如果 NSF 不提高天文类项目的总预算或者关闭一些研究设施，将会有3千万的资金短缺，因此还会其它项目也会有资金麻烦。
What does make Arecibo different is that most of those other facilities are in states, whereas Arecibo is in a U.S. protectorate. Puerto Rico doesn't have Senators to help protect budget appropriations. It does have Representatives, but the last time I checked, their representatives are not voting members of the Congress.
Arecibo 还有一处特别是因为其它的研究设施都在美国国内，而波多黎各却没有参议员可以去为它争取预算。
On the other hand, there is the National Radio Astronomy Observatories (NRAO) which has facilities in West Virginia (home of Senator Byrd) and New Mexico (home of Senator Domenici). Arecibo is NOT part of NRAO. A couple years ago the director of NRAO called his senators and said NRAO needed $2 million more than NSF was going to give it. So Byrd and Domenici earmarked $4 million (yes $4 million) in additional funds for NRAO. Of course that money had to come from somewhere else in the NSF astronomy budget. That was when Arecibo's budget was reduced by $2 million. I don't know where the other $2 million came from.
Arecibo 的预算已经因为 NRAO 的预算增加而被砍2百万，还有2百万不知道从哪里砍的。Arecibo 不属于 NRAO。 // 不知道这个NRAO是做什么用的。
The directory of the Planetary Society said, in the Post article, that an earmark might be a good option for keeping Arecibo open. I'm not so sure, given that any money earmarked for Arecibo will come from some other Astronomy program. A better option is a 15% (constant dollars) increase in the NSF Astronomy budget over the next 5 years.
行星学会曾建议为 Arecibo 申请项目专款，但总预算不变的话，其它项目的预算就会降低。最好的办法是 NSF 在随后5年逐年增加15%的预算。
I'll talk to the people who attended the meeting next week. I've written my Senators and Congressmen already and used some back channels to make the chair of the House Appropriations Committee aware of the situation. It would probably help if you wrote yours as well. We may organize a full letter writing campaign in the near future to help get our point across to Congress, but there's no need to wait for that. Letters work better than emails, and personal visits work best of all, if you happen to be traveling to Washington DC.
项目方的应对措施及呼吁。
For those of you outside of the U.S., should all of our efforts fail, there may be a place for international cooperation in funding Arecibo. If the U.S. government doesn't want it, maybe the E.U. does. We'll let you know how it goes.
如果美国政府不给钱，项目方也希望能通过国际组织间合作的形式来资助 Arecibo。
Eric Korpela “而唯一能替代 Arecibo 的 SKA 至少也要到 2020 年才能正式运行。”
咱们中国的fast不也能比arecibo强吗？ FAST貌似不参与凤凰计划 在FAST的科学目标中也提到了SETI。
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