UK physicists face cuts on the Gemini telescopes. Credit: GEMINI OBSERVATORY

Britain will try to sell 50% of its observing time on the Gemini telescopes to help make up for an £80-million (US$157-million) budget shortfall, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) revealed last week. Funding for astronomy, particle physics and space science are all to be cut.

The council says it will be “reviewing our future involvement in Gemini”. It also slashed the UK contribution to ExoMars, a European-led mission to the red planet, by 25%. Britain had been contributing about £80 million, one-tenth of the mission's overall budget.

The STFC claimed the funding package would secure the future of Britain's Jodrell Bank radio astronomy facility, which had been in some doubt.

The council scaled down a proposed 25% reduction in UK funding for the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva. Amid concerns that such cuts would do “unacceptable damage” to the project, funding will be reduced instead by 5% in the project's first year and 10% in subsequent years.