Problems of the Modern Romanian Astronomy: TELEROM

Grigore, Valentin; Minti, Harry; Vaduvescu, Ovidiu
Bibliographical reference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO6QvXKCPoo (Romanian title: Noi si cerul: Telerom (1))

Advertised on:
6
2011
Number of authors
3
IAC number of authors
0
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
The TV broadcast discusses problems of the modernization of the Romanian astronomical infrastructure, the worst in Eastern Europe. It presents the TELEROM project which proposed to establish a new EU-funded robotic 1,3 m telescope, a project finally rejected by the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy mainly due to the incompetence of the director of this Institute, Dr. Vasile Mioc. It is mentioned that this was the second very promising project failed under the same director, after the project ASTEROS in value of 15 million Euro to establish two modern telescopes was also lost in the recent years. The total cost of the TELEROM project was 1,5 million Euro, according to the agreement with the EU foundation for Regional Development (director Hanns Ruder Institut für Theoretische Astrophysik, Universität Tübingen, Germany - the TELEROM auto-dimissed project director). The facilities from this implementation were very promising in observations of Solar system objects (asteroids, near Earth asteroids, comets), few hundred millions of faint stars, quasars, exoplanets and galaxies. Initially, the director Vasile Mioc and the governing body of the Romanian Astronomical Institute intended to place the telescope in Romania in very bad astroclimatic conditions, namely in the old Feleac observatory, very close to the very highly polluted and quite clouded city of Cluj-Napoca. Many opposite considerations (Dr. Marian Doru Suran from Bucharest, many Romanian astronomers from the Diaspora and a group of 68 astronomers, professors, public outreach people and students from Romania and Diaspora supporting TELEROM) were totally disregarded! Due to refuse to place the telescope in very good astroclimatic conditions (in Canary Islands or Chile) and also due to the impossibility to establish a decent national astronomical observatory in Romania by the direction of the Institute in agreement with the State body of Romania ("Academia Romana" and "Autoritatea Nationala pentru Cercetare") the TELEROM project was finally rejected and its funding was lost, after 10 months of discussions and granted funding! Other problems, such as the proliferation of the astrology between Romanian professional astronomers, a reduced weight of physicists between Romanian professional astronomers in comparison with mathematicians, as well as very reduced issue from the professional Romanian astronomers in international journals in the last years and the intellectual theft of publications have been also discussed in this 4 TV series presented by the weekly astronomy show "We and the Sky" of Columna TV (in Romanian).