HILO, Hawai'i — A new University of Hawai'i report on the future of astronomy on Mauna Kea envisions tearing down some observatories to return the land to its original condition, but also renews the call to build a huge $1 billion telescope on an undeveloped part of the mountain.

UH is abandoning plans for a major new optical telescope called for in a master plan drafted six years ago, and will dramatically scale back plans to expand the newest observatory, the Submillimeter Array.

Most startling are the report's predictions for some of the older observatories on Mauna Kea. Rather than rebuilding or replacing those aging facilities, the plan is to "demolish the old facility, to clean the site and to recreate the site in a stage as it was, before the facility had been built."

"The long-range goal is to have eventually fewer observatories than now, but certainly still the very best in the world," according to the report by Rolf-Peter Kudritzki, director of the UH Institute for Astronomy.

Mauna Kea is widely regarded as one of the finest sites for astronomy in the world, and the loss of an observatory on the mountain represents lost opportunities for scientists who want to do research there. In fact, there is continuing pressure for new projects.

Plans already are under way to replace a small 1968 telescope on Mauna Kea with a more modern one for use by UH-Hilo, and to replace the 88-inch UH telescope with the futuristic Pan-STARRS system designed to spot asteroids and comets that could crash into Earth.

However, Mauna Kea is also considered sacred to some Hawaiians, and the critics of development of observatories on Mauna Kea have become increasingly organized and vocal in recent years.

One recent proposal for a new facility was for the Outriggers telescopes at W.M. Keck Observatory, a project that was stalled for years by legal fights with Hawaiian activists and environmentalists. The Outriggers project was finally abandoned after NASA cut its funding last year. (See Page One for related story.)

The new UH report does not spell out which facilities might someday be removed from Mauna Kea, but it notes that the 2000 Mauna Kea Science Reserve Master Plan identified the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope, the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility as among the "older" facilities that might be upgraded or replaced in the years ahead.

Those three 118- to 150-inch telescopes were built in 1979, and are much smaller than the new generation of telescopes.

Christian Veillet, executive director of the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope, said he sees that facility continuing to do important scientific work a decade from now and beyond. In any event, the telescope has a sub-lease that extends until 2033, he said.

"Technology is improving, news ideas emerge there, new ways of doing things, which means that even a four-meter class telescope can be really great," he said.

"People can come with very clever ideas to use them even though they are considered old and small, to make it very competitive again, and so I'm not sure of the view that some of these older facilities would just close. For me, I don't know, I wouldn't bet on that right away."

STARGAZER DEAL

The report by the Institute for Astronomy to state lawmakers sketches out several changes in the 2000 plan for the 11,288-acre Mauna Kea Science Reserve, which the state leases to the university.

The existing observatories are clustered together on 525 acres of that area, and the university sub-leases the observatory sites to various scientific partnerships for nominal cash rents. In return for the low rents, UH astronomers get to use the world-class facilities.

The partnerships — which built and maintain the optical, infrared, submillimeter and radio telescopes — allocate observation time on the telescopes for UH astronomers.

That arrangement allowed the UH astronomy program to rapidly develop into one of the best in the world, according to the report, and made Mauna Kea the world's largest astronomy complex with a dozen observatories.

The report outlines a number of changes in the Mauna Kea Science Reserve Master Plan: