The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, UK, faces closure if alternative funding is not secured.Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty
A growing clamour of voices is calling for the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, to reinstate funding for the iconic Lovell radio telescope, at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the country’s main funding agency, announced on 27 July that in 2028 it would cut all of its £2.8 million (about US$3.8 million) annual funding for e-Merlin, a network of seven UK radio telescopes funded by one of UKRI’s divisions, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). E-Merlin provides Lovell’s only scientific funding, and unless alternative cash is found, the telescope will stop operations.
“To close it down would be to poke out some of the world’s clearest eyes on the sky,” reads an open letter to save the telescope, which calls the move “foolish and short-sighted”. The letter is signed by stars of science and the arts, including the British astronaut Tim Peake, particle physicist and musician Brian Cox and the UK poet laureate, Simon Armitage. As well as being used to study the cosmos, Lovell tracks human-made objects, including modern space debris and, famously, the rocket that launched the Sputnik-1 satellite in 1957.
The wider Jodrell Bank site, which is owned by the University of Manchester, will continue as a site for scientific outreach and as headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a network of antennas in Australia and South Africa that, once completed, will make up the world’s largest telescope. The STFC is investing £327 million in the SKA between 2021 and 2030.
The defunding is part of a wider array of cuts that are the result of a prioritization exercise conducted by the STFC under the previous prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. That department, which was created just three years ago, has now been disbanded and merged into a wider business department.
The reductions come despite a growing budget for UKRI. The body’s funding is set to increase over the next four years, with extra cash aimed mainly at priority areas, such as artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. These are due to receive £1.6 billion and £1 billion over that period, respectively. Meanwhile, the STFC funding has remained flat. But energy costs have been rising, as have membership fees for international science organizations, owing to unfavourable exchange rates. This has meant that savings need to be found elsewhere, according to UKRI.
Cumulative cuts
The STFC announced last month that scientific facilities that it funds will have to find cash from commercial sources to survive. The facilities include the Diamond Light Source in Harwell and other centres that host large-scale instruments and national laboratories. The latest cuts reveal how projects in the council’s Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics (PPAN) portfolio are affected. The annual budget for this funding stream is set to fall by 2.7%, or £6 million, by 2030. According to the STFC’s executive chair, Michele Dougherty, the cuts need to be made to safeguard funding for postdoctoral researchers, PhD opportunities and to maintain “the UK’s international leadership”.
The announcement last week also confirmed the fates of international projects with infrastructure funding that was cut by the STFC in December, as part of the same exercise.
As first revealed by Research Professional News, an investment of around £49 million was cancelled for an upgrade to the LHCb experiment at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, in which the United Kingdom has been a long-time leader. Also pulled was a £58.8-million contribution to the US Electron-Ion Collider, which is designed to study the structure of atomic nuclei.
The latest announcement, which denied both projects funding through the separate PPAN route, shuts down any chance of an alternative source of investment.
