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Arecibo radio telescope goes dark after snapped cable shreds dish
- unsrsly 6y agoThis dish was in the movie Goldeneye and apparently a lot of other films as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory
- umvi 6y agoThis dish is also the final level of the Nintendo 64 "Goldeneye" game - "Cradle"
- LolWolf 6y agoIt was also in Battlefield 4 ("Rogue Transmission")
- cptskippy 6y agoNo it isn't. The BF4 campaign takes place in China. The map for Rogue Transmission is a fictional location in Guizhou Province in southwest China.
- LolWolf 6y agoI mean, yes, obviously it's not literally the Arecibo telescope in the same location, but it's a heavy inspiration and quite similar in design and structure. (For example, an obvious difference in BF4 is the surrounding forest, which not as dense as in Puerto Rico's location.)
- cptskippy 6y agoI would say it takes inspiration from Arecibo over FAST but it's clearly neither. The surrounding topology is flat in comparison to either and there isn't much of a forest to speak of. It's clearly a level design that takes inspiration from reality. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gsveKZdntJc/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gsveKZdntJc/maxresdefault.jpg
- LolWolf 6y agoCorrect! I did not mean to say that it was actually Arecibo in a different country, but rather that it was fairly heavily inspired by it. I mentioned some of what you talk about in the latter part of your comment in another reply on a descendant of the GGP.
- ajmurmann 6y agoIs it fictional or based on the larger, similar looking Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope located in Guizhou? See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_...
- LolWolf 6y agoI don't think it is, since FAST (finished 2016) wasn't finished until well after the game had been released (2013)—on the other hand, parts of it were built (FAST was started 2011), so perhaps there was partial inspiration? I'm honestly not sure, but certainly a lot of the design is much more similar to Arecibo (if memory serves me right). I also haven't played the game in years, so take this with a grain of salt :)
- cptskippy 6y agoIt's fictional, the overall design of the cable towers is taken from Arecibo's, FAST's towers are distinctly different. It's clearly neither though as the surrounding topology is flat and mostly devoid of trees, both FAST and Arecibo are nestled in valleys dense in foliage. That sort of layout doesn't play well in video games.
- alkonaut 6y agoIt's obviously set in a non-jungle environment in the game so it's only superficially similar, but it's' scary how much the game looks like real life after the accident (The dish is destroyed in the game and the gameplay takes place on and under the half-destroyed dish).
- breck 6y agoIMO Contact being the best https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Contact.php https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Contact.php
- brianzelip 6y ago> The image used for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album cover, was originally created by radio astronomer Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory for his 1970 Ph.D. thesis. !
- supernova87a 6y agoStory has been posted already 2 other times in the last 2 days? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128877
- arthurcolle 6y agoI didn't see it the first two times, so I'm happy it was posted again.
- bookofjoe 6y agoditto
- jcims 6y agoAccording to this paper [1] each of those panels is ~3x6 feet (presumably 1x2m) and RMS surface error across the primary surface of the antenna is ~5mm http://gancell.com/papers/CMSC%202001_Final.pdf http://gancell.com/papers/CMSC%202001_Final.pdf
- Natales 6y agoThis is sad. Puerto Rico has already been hit hard so many times. Agree or not, the observatory has a prominent place in pop culture, which helps bring the much needed visitors, and with them, awareness of Space Research and Science in general, in a time when sparking interest in STEM in the next generation is so important.
- joe_the_user 6y agoIt's tragic. Unfortunately, it's easy to see things like this in terms of a pattern of neglected infrastructure in the US. Puerto Rico in general has been damaged and neglected to a criminal extent - this particular situation will get media attention for a bit, maybe be fixed but that's likely about it.
- mturmon 6y agoIn this case, it's a complex story. NSF has a collection of astronomical observatories (optical and radio). Some of them have decades-old equipment, and keeping everything operating will eventually preclude building anything new. So, NSF has been trying to offload some older observatories to universities, or consortia of universities - Arecibo is one such. For instance, some older solar observatories were taken offline to build DKIST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telesco...), which is an amazing instrument, just now coming online. Of course, there is a lot of strife and anger caused by reallocation of resources like this.
- dylan604 6y agoI'm on my way to look up DKIST, but after SOHO, it's hard to imagine needing ground based solar observatories. Of course, SOHO will eventually come to end of mission, so we definitely need other observatories. It's just the SOHO imagery is stellar.
- mturmon 6y agoYou’re a little out of date! SoHO is largely shut down, has been for a decade now. Its tent pole instruments were replaced by SDO in 2010. (https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/ https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/) Both of these are NASA, not NSF, observatories. They were (SoHO) and are (SDO) amazing resources that have advanced the whole area of heliophysics. DKIST (NSF) has a 4m aperture. Unbelievable for a solar telescope, and of course, impossible to fly under reasonable NASA heliophysics budgets.
- markus_zhang 6y agoIs it the same one in x files e2m1? Sorry I meant s2e1 ahem
- knodi123 6y agoYes. Arecibo is mentioned in the episode description, and the x-files episode is mention on the Arecibo wiki page. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751154/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751154/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory
- markus_zhang 6y agoThanks! Good memory here...
- HumblyTossed 6y agoPretty sad that this happened. It is rather iconic. Interesting, though, I did not realize my Alma Mater took over management of it.
- markrages 6y agoFor the benefit of other engineers who have not read the article: The damage was done by a wire rope, not an electrical cable.
- oasisbob 6y agoGlad I'm not the only one who initially read "cable" as more likely to be electrical than structural.
- JshWright 6y agoScott Manley posted an excellent video with some discussion of this incident, as well as going over some of the major contributions Arecibo has made to science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bargle0 6y agoThe thing that’s crazy about Arecibo is that it’s not just a telescope — it’s also a very high power transmitter, so they’re doing astronomy with RADAR. I didn’t know such a thing was even possible until this week.
- kzrdude 6y agoCool, so what do they target? It must be something reasonably close. Though I realize even light year reflections are possible!
- acqq 6y ago> so what do they target? Traditionally, Moon, Venus, asteroids. Also: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Radiation_astronomy/Radars#Arecibo_Observatory https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Radiation_astronomy/Radars#A... "the round trip light time to objects beyond Saturn is longer than the time the telescope can track it, preventing radar observations of more distant objects." Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message "The Arecibo message is a 1974 interstellar radio message carrying basic information about humanity and Earth sent to globular star cluster M13. It was meant as a demonstration of human technological achievement, rather than a real attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials." "The message consisted of 1,679 binary digits, approximately 210 bytes, transmitted at a frequency of 2,380 MHz and modulated by shifting the frequency by 10 Hz, with a power of 450 kW. The "ones" and "zeros" were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes."
- rimliu 6y agoSolar system: https://www.naic.edu/ao/scientist-user-portal/planetary-sciences https://www.naic.edu/ao/scientist-user-portal/planetary-scie...
- api 6y agoJust in time for the thing for which Oumuamua was a spent deceleration stage... :)
- lambdatronics 6y agoCame here to make alien attack joke.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoThese are the first pics of the underside I've ever seen. I'd like to see more of the infrastructure.
- dylan604 6y agoWatch the movie Contact. There's an entire scene underneath the dome. also: http://www.mreclipse.com/Observatory/Arecibo/full/Arecibo03-118w.JPG http://www.mreclipse.com/Observatory/Arecibo/full/Arecibo03-...
- JshWright 6y agoTom Scott did a video about Arecibo and posted a "behind the scenes" video on his second channel that covers a lot of interesting spaces in and around the telescope. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZAWqk-wrzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZAWqk-wrzc
- thelittleone 6y agoWow the extent of the damage is surprising. Seems like a pretty big design oversight. If one broken cable can cause such damage, there should be redundancy built in. One extra cable. "One is none, two is one". From the luxury of my hindsight chair.
- dylan604 6y agoA 3" cable of this type is not an insignificant thing. Have you ever seen the cables used to support telephone poles? Those are maybe 3/8" (working from memory). If you are a teenager running in the dark at full speed at night while attempting to evade being caught papering a friends house and catch one of these cables across your neck, you're going to have a very bad night. I've seen the results. The damage isn't from something failing because there was no other support after this cable failed. It was this failing cable falling back to the ground that did the damage. If it were an object like a rock, it would just drop straight-ish down to make a hole where it impacts. This is a cable that would make that initial impact hole, but would continue to do damage as it was pulled into its final resting spot.
- coolgeek 6y agoOof... I caught one of those phone pole cables on the forehead running in the dark one night, and I caught the guy wire of a soccer net/goal under the chin one day during practice. Both very unpleasant experiences
- a5withtrrs 6y agoThere is actually quite a bit of redundancy in place, there are several cables which all still hold the larger instrumentation cluster in place above the dish and are able to tolerate a failure like the one that occurred.
- learnstats2 6y agoThis comment suggests that you did not read the article. I will quote some of the key points that you may have missed: 1. "The cable that broke this week was not one of the main support cables but one of several auxiliary ones" 2. "Because it contained a lot of stored energy from tension, it flailed around wildly, damaging the Gregorian dome and the main reflector of the dish" 3. "Typically, such cables don’t fail in that way"
- mastazi 6y ago> some steering is possible by moving the receivers, or antennas, around a platform suspended by cables high above the dish. The cable that broke this week was not one of the main support cables but one of several auxiliary ones added in the 1990s to stabilize the platform when a large new antenna, known as the Gregorian dome, was added. If anyone is curious, in this article there is a picture where you can see the suspended platform with the "Gregorian dome": https://www.npr.org/2020/08/12/901920638/puerto-ricos-arecibo-radio-telescope-damaged-by-falling-cable https://www.npr.org/2020/08/12/901920638/puerto-ricos-arecib...
- rmason 6y agoI've always been fascinated by the Arecibo Observatory. There was a ham radio operator who was an early employee there. I met him at the Dayton Ham convention in the early seventies. I planned a trip to Puerto Rico around ten years later. Unfortunately I suffered bad food poisoning on Guadeloupe and by the time I got to San Juan I was so ill that I had to cut out the trip to Arecibo. Still want to see it someday.
- liv-io 6y agoArecibo? Makes me want to listen to Carbon Based Lifeforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifiICunJ-ZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifiICunJ-ZA
- waheoo 6y ago> Typically, such cables don’t fail in that way, which is “concerning,” he says. Definitely aliens covering their tracks.
- unixhero 6y agoIs it over for Arecibo then?
- ChaseT 6y agoWhat a shame, especially that the dome reflector was damaged too. I remember visiting in person and being awestruck by the sheer size and engineering skill needed to make this. Plus it provides needed tourism revenue for PR; I hope it's not abandoned.