The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that four institutions will take over stewardship of the site of the former Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, as it transitions from a research hub to an education centre.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) at Río Piedras in San Juan; and the University of the Sacred Heart, also in San Juan; will oversee the new centre, in which the NSF will invest US$5.5 million over five years.
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The decision comes nearly a year after the agency called for proposals on setting up and running an education centre at Arecibo. Two years before that, the observatory’s main telescope collapsed, and instead of rebuilding the instrument — which once made discoveries about exoplanets and studied near-Earth asteroids, among other things — the NSF said it would close down astronomy research at the site.
Monya Ruffin, deputy director of the NSF’s Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings Division, says that the agency chose the proposal submitted by the four institutions because it had “these three prongs that really jumped out to us”. If all goes according to plan, the centre will open in early 2024 and focus on education in the sciences, including biology and computer science, as well as community outreach. And its name — Arecibo C3 (Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education, Computational Skills, and Community Engagement) — alludes to this trio of priorities.
“The need for computation skills, and ultimately the need to reach people in their communities and integrate science into everybody’s life, is what a science centre does,” says Jason Williams, an assistant director at Cold Spring Harbor’s DNA learning lab and one of the lead authors of the winning proposal.
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Some researchers worry about the site’s move away from astronomy research, however. Arecibo’s prowess at astronomy was a source of pride in Puerto R
