The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is being charged with cronyism and procedural irregularities in the awarding of a valuable radio antenna to an international collaboration. A protest letter sent by a US bidder, obtained by Nature this week under public records laws, lays out the allegations in greater detail than when we reported the story on February 1.
The Vertex Prototype Antenna (VPA) is an approximately $10 million dish funded by NSF to test specifications for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a radio observatory expected to come online this year in Chile. The antenna is capabale of picking up radio emissions in the relatively unexplored sub-millimetre realm. After realizing that the prototype wasn’t suitable for inclusion in the 66-dish array, NSF decided in 2010 to make it available to bidders, and asked the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to write a call for expressions of interest. NSF’s choice for the winning bid came from the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) in Taipei, Taiwan, which was collaborating with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, and which is considering putting the antenna at a field station at the peak of the Greenland ice sheet to do studies of black holes at the centers of galaxies. But a technical review by the NRAO favored instead a bid by University of Arizona, which wanted to put the antenna on Kitt Peak near Tucson and use it to make observations of molecules in interstellar clouds, and, the protest letter says, studies of black holes.
In the letter, University of Arizona president Robert Shelton raises a number of concerns about the NSF decision, including whether, considering the value of the antenna, its award should have been reviewed by an independent panel of experts. It accuses the NSF of procedural irregularities in its process, and makes charges of cronyism, citing what it alleges is a “closely-knit triumvirate” of Fred Lo, director of NRAO, Peter Ho, principal investigator of ASIAA, and Vernon Pankonin, the NSF official who made the decision.
Shelton also writes that it would be in the US national interest to award the antenna to University of Arizona. “The antenna was built with US taxpayers’ money. It cannot be in the national interest to transfer ownership of an asset such as the VPA to a foreign-led group that proposes to locate the antenna in Greenland – yet another foreign country.” NSF has emphasized that the antenna will be transferred not to ASIAA, but to its collaborating institution, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, so that it will remain a US item.
Shelton requests reconsideration of the decision to transfer the VPA and asks that any attempt to move the antenna be deferred.
Pankonin did not respond to a request for comment. NSF press spokesman Lisa Van Pay explained that the NSF could not comment because the protest letter, sent February 7th to the Director of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Edward Seidel, is still under consideration. In an interview in January, Pankonin denied that there was any conflict of interest involved in the antenna award and emphasized that Lo did not influence his decision. The NSF rules on conflict of interest prohibit conflicts arising from “significant financial interests” but do not address issues of alleged cronyism.
Image: The Vertex Prototype Antenna / NRAO