07-04-2026, 03:36 PM
Edited response: "Those against astronomy/science and critical thinking in Hawaii will claim a win because another observatory has been shut down. The real reason it was shut down is that the federal funding agency was unable to commit to funding UKIRT operations, had put the IfA into debt, and that debt was unsustainable for the Institute of Astronomy....
Closing UKIRT early has nothing to do with Hawaiian claims about the mountain being sacred, colonization, or whatever crazy stuff will be posted now.... The best way to say it online is that USNO's ability to fund UKIRT's operations became too unstable and unpredictable to continue UKIRT operations without the IfA being put into unrecoverable debt...
...The original lease says nothing about swapping out telescopes. Secondly, UKIRT was the most scientifically productive telescope on the planet for several years. Thirdly, it produced the highest-impact scientific results per dollar of any telescope anywhere, by a massive margin; no telescope comes close in cost per scientific result, including those in orbit.
Because it was one of the first observatories on the mountain and was not run like a US corporation, it helped provide some of the most important results in the history of observational astrophysics. It was the scientific and engineering staff that made that happen...
Closing UKIRT early has nothing to do with Hawaiian claims about the mountain being sacred, colonization, or whatever crazy stuff will be posted now.... The best way to say it online is that USNO's ability to fund UKIRT's operations became too unstable and unpredictable to continue UKIRT operations without the IfA being put into unrecoverable debt...
...The original lease says nothing about swapping out telescopes. Secondly, UKIRT was the most scientifically productive telescope on the planet for several years. Thirdly, it produced the highest-impact scientific results per dollar of any telescope anywhere, by a massive margin; no telescope comes close in cost per scientific result, including those in orbit.
Because it was one of the first observatories on the mountain and was not run like a US corporation, it helped provide some of the most important results in the history of observational astrophysics. It was the scientific and engineering staff that made that happen...