An oversight committee for Arecibo Observatory, the national astronomical facility in Puerto Rico, has been established to act as a management link between Cornell University, which manages the huge radio telescope, and the U.S. funding agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF).

"The NSF wanted assurance that more attention is being paid to the management of NAIC," says Martha Haynes, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy at Cornell, who is chairing the new committee. The NAIC is the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, formed at Cornell in 1971 to manage the telescope for the federal agency.

"The NSF pays a lot more attention to the management of large national research facilities than it used to, partly at the direction of Congress," says Haynes. "This places increasing demands on institutions that manage these facilities, which is why both the NSF and Cornell decided it would be a good idea to have this committee." Haynes also is chair of the board of the Associated Universities Inc., the nine-university group that operates the National Radio Astronomy Observatory research facility for the NSF.

One of the first tasks to occupy the four-person Arecibo committee -- officially called the Cornell NAIC Oversight Committee, or CNOC -- is the search for a new director of NAIC to succeed Paul Goldsmith, the J.A. Weeks Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell, who is stepping down after a decade in the post. The new director, expected to be announced shortly, is going to face major changes in the way science is done at the national observatories, says Haynes. "There is an enormous amount going on."

Among the changes at Arecibo Observatory:

• A greatly improved way of carrying out radio astronomy research will be made possible by a new instrument that will begin operation around 2005. The so-called Arecibo L-band Feed Array, dubbed ALFA, will enable major survey projects of the heavens and result in a massive increase in the astronomical data that will flow out of Arecibo. The NSF-funded $1.2 million array of seven "dual polarization" receivers is likely to result in the further discovery of many fast-spinning neutron stars, called pulsars, and possibly even the first detection of the holy grail of astronomy, a pulsar in orbit around a black hole. (Neutron stars are the highly dense, collapsed cores of stars that are thrown out in stellar explosions called supernovas.) "This instrument is going to offer a sea change in the way science is done," says Haynes.
• The completion of fiber-optic cable links from Arecibo to the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan and to the U.S. mainland has made possible the remote operation of the telescope from computers in most of the world's universities. "I have just had a note from graduate students at Berkeley [the University of California] who have been running the observatory remotely and making maps of galaxies," says Goldsmith.
• The completion of the latest upgrade to the telescope in 1997 is enabling Arecibo Observatory to cover the full frequency range, up to 10 GHz from the previous 2 GHz, allowing the observation of new kinds of astronomical objects, in particular those regions where stars are forming in galaxies from dense molecular clouds. (This upgrade replaced the line feeds with a Gregorian reflector system as the main method of focusing radio waves reflected from the 1,000-foot-diameter dish.) "People from all over the world are beginning to see Arecibo as a place they can use for studies of star formation, not just of other galaxies or planets," says Goldsmith. This requires fine-tuning the telescope's dish to an accuracy of 2 millimeters overall.
• Plans to link Arecibo to other large radio telescopes in the United States and Europe are under way. The goal is to develop a very long baseline interferometer -- in which radio signals from distant objects in the universe are captured by separate antennas and brought together at a central processor -- that could detect astronomical sources never before seen. "We could watch pulsars move across the sky in a matter of months, or watch supernovas explode," says Haynes. "It hasn't been done before because Arecibo wasn't adequately equipped."
• The completion of the Angel Ramos Foundation Visitor and Education Center at Arecibo is bringing many more conferences and workshops to the observatory. In November the observatory hosted a conference on pulsars, and a gathering on meteors is scheduled for January. In the summer of 2001, the observatory hosted its first summer school in radio astronomy, attended by 75 graduate students and astronomers. "The whole education and outreach complexion at Arecibo has changed," says Goldsmith.