If this fall has proved anything about ALMA’s radio telescope operations, it’s that they are robust to changes in resources, whether it’s people or money. Based in the Atacama Desert of Chile, the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array survived a two-week workers strike from the end of August to the beginning of September. During most of this time, the 195 technicians and support staff who belonged to the ALMA workers union put down their equipment and turned off their monitors in order to demand better pay and a shorter work week from their managers. They got what they wanted and went back to work.
Now, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is largely funded by the National Science Foundation, the US government’s funding arm for scientific research, has completely shut down research at all of its US-based radio telescope arrays: the GBT in West Virginia, the VLA in New Mexico and the VLBA that streches from Hawaii to Virgin Islands. If the shutdown lasts too long, then the telescopes must be completely shut down, and the data from this past year will have to be trashed. That translates into wasted man hours and telescopes that will be costly to restore.
The NRAO is one of ALMA’s partners. Because it has some extra reserves in Chile, it can run its telescopes there for three to four more weeks. After that time, the research that is done with them will have to stop at the very least, or the telescopes will have to shut down entirely. Until then, it looks like ALMA can sail smoothly. It remains to be seen whether losing the US-based satellites will cripple ALMA’s research if it comes to that next month.
ALMA may have suffered from a small hiatus last month, and a financial setback looms over the horizon, but things seem to be running smoothly for now.
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