RAF Defford<\/a> runway forming part of a vital international research effort.\n<\/p>\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just scientific vandalism but it is proof that the Prime Minister says one thing while allowing his Ministers to do another.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt seems madness to me that the Government is blowing our money on a South African telescope array when we have a perfectly good system operating at a fraction of the cost, for the benefit of the whole world, in the heart of our country.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt has important science benefits and can even support our national defence programme.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cI\u2019m writing to the Government again to ask Ministers to review the funding cancellation and I hope that we\u2019ll have a continuing operating radio telescope in West Worcestershire for many years to come.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n The Defford telescope stands on the site of the former RAF Defford airfield, which played an important role in Britain’s wartime development of radar and later became associated with radio astronomy.\n<\/p>\n
\n Today the dish is one of the telescopes making up e-MERLIN, which combines observations from dishes at different sites to allow astronomers to study distant objects in space in greater detail.\n<\/p>\n
\n The wider Jodrell Bank site has played a pioneering role in radio astronomy since the 1940s, including work tracking spacecraft during the early space race and research into quasars, pulsars and gravitational lenses.\n<\/p>\n
\n Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds has insisted Jodrell Bank has a \u201csecure future\u201d and said he had met representatives from the University of Manchester in an attempt to find a solution.\n<\/p>\n
\n He said there had been a \u201cscience-based decision\u201d to move from e-MERLIN towards the Square Kilometre Array, an international radio astronomy project headquartered at Jodrell Bank with telescopes being constructed in Australia and South Africa.\n<\/p>\n
\n The dispute centres on the future of e-MERLIN rather than Jodrell Bank as a whole, with Dame Harriett calling for ministers to reverse the funding decision and keep the Defford telescope operating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Defford dish forms part of e-MERLIN, a network of seven radio telescopes spread across England and centred…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-812374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}