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Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
- Communitivity 6y agoThis is horrible. Arecibo is still crucial in radio astronomy experiments ongoing as of 2019. It should be repaired, until a replacement is built.
- protoster 6y agoAs the article explains, it has been deemed to be unsafe to repair. What's probably missing in that sentence is "...within an acceptable budget."
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoNot sure... even with an infinite budget, you need time to build your repair solutions. It's possible that for no amount of money can you repair it before it suffers complete collapse without doing risky things that may cause loss of life.
- marcinzm 6y agoYup, as the classic saying goes "nine women can't make a baby in one month". There's a minimum time for things even without budget constraints.
- tootie 6y agoThe article also says the NSF has been looking to divest since 2006 in favor of other projects and had a signed agreement to transfer operations to UCF. It's not simply a matter of whether or not it's still useful, but whether it's worth the cost relative to other facilities.
- zaroth 6y agoSpeaking with absolutely no expertise in the matter, I would guess it’s on the verge of collapse due to lack of maintenance or fatal design flaw. It’s probably no longer a matter of fixing more like a total rebuild would be required?
- LUmBULtERA 6y agoI loved seeing Arecibo when I last visited PR. It is sad to see it dismantled -- I wonder what plans, if any, there are to replace its capabilities.
- topspin 6y agoFAST is now online, newer and larger.
- cpascal 6y agoIt seems FAST isn't a complete substitute for Arecibo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope#Comparison_with_Arecibo_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lobotryas 6y agoWhose money are you volunteering to be spent on that?
- deeeeplearning 6y agoI'm sure you could trade a handful of Patriot missiles and one or two F-35's to fund it several times over.
- singemonkey 6y agoQuick and probably very inaccurate calculation Arecibo cost $9.3 million in 1963. This is equal to $79,000,000 now (https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1963?amount=9300000 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1963?amount=93000...). An F-35 costs about $100 million. Based on that, I'd be happy to give up a single F-35 to rebuild Arecibo.
- petschge 6y agoAnd the US is planning to purchase 2500 of those. Because 2400 are clearly not enough.
- admiralspoo 6y agoThe defense budget is tiny compared to the US's welfare state programs.
- zaroth 6y agoIt also affords the US a position as the world’s reserve currency which itself is worth trillions of dollars. I’m not sure the ROI analysis is particularly straightforward, all things considered.
- deeeeplearning 6y agoYou think that removing 2 F-35s from the budget will significantly alter that calculus? To be clear. The US' >5000 Nuclear warheads is more than enough to cement its place as the most important military power in the world.
- magicalhippo 6y agoYeah, in the previous story I mentioned[1] NANOGrav, which is on the brink of some really interesting science but relies heavily on Arecibo for their dataset. They mention a delay of more than a few months of data from Arecibo would have very negative consequences, so an outright loss must be a very, very significant blow for them. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046378
- dekhn 6y agoAs soon as I heard a second cable had broken, I knew they would shut it down.
- beamatronic 6y agoIs the same money (replacement cost) better spent on a space-based solution?
- topbanana 6y agoit wouldn't be the same money
- Metacelsus 6y agoI don't think atmospheric absorption/scattering is as much of an issue for radio telescopes as it is for other kinds.
- jcims 6y agoIonosphere eats/reflects mostly everything below 10Mhz
- geuis 6y agoNot really in this case. It’s much cheaper to build a larger and more capable installation on the ground.
- sp332 6y agoA space-based solution won't get you such a large dish. And that means you can't get effective 20 terawatts of output power for active radar across the solar system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#General_information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#General_in...
- PopePompus 6y agoNothing remotely similar to this has ever been built in space. This telescope is one of the very few which transmits radio waves as well as receiving them. The transmitters are used for radar mapping of solar system objects, as well as ionospheric research. Reproducing this instrument in space would probably cost as much as the ISS. It would be a Large Hadron Collider class investment.
- 6y ago
- IronRanger 6y agoIs this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?
- caeril 6y agoOur intellectual capability is not degraded; rather, it's funneled into adtech, porn, social media click optimization, and entertainment. Critical distinction.
- pmiller2 6y agoAh, yes, all those smart people making a Brave New World, while that world literally burns is totally not the same as degrading our intellectual capacity.
- WalterSear 6y agoSounds like degradation to me.
- marcinzm 6y agoNothing lasts forever and things require ever more upkeep costs as they get older.
- kitd 6y agoTbf China has one that's half a kilometer wide, so there's still hope for progress :) http://www.hexapolis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Worlds-Largest-Radio-Telescope-In-China-To-Look-For-Alien-Life-3.jpg http://www.hexapolis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Worlds-L...
- mlindner 6y agoThe China one doesn't have the ability to transmit, only receive.
- hindsightbias 6y agoThey take the Trisolarans seriously.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI remember as a child some kids' show taking us down to the dish as we cruise around and under the huge thing in the jungle. Thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. I can't believe this legend is all going to be discarded.
- overkill28 6y agoReading Rainbow? That's where I first learned about it. You can see the clip here: https://youtu.be/Fl32aV3RcpE?t=1176 https://youtu.be/Fl32aV3RcpE?t=1176
- myself248 6y agoFuuuuuuuck. I understand the decision to dismantle the failing structure which is currently unsafe and tricky to repair. But might a new one be built in its place? How can we push for that?
- Darmody 6y agoOr maybe use all that money to build a good one on the Moon.
- PopePompus 6y agoall of that money, plus a thousand times more.
- Darmody 6y agoYes, of course it costs more, just as that telescope costs way more than the one I have at home.
- simonh 6y agoNot in your yard more and on the moon more are both more, so therefore the same. Got it.
- Darmody 6y agoYou missed my point. I know is way more expensive but that's how every thing else is. Every next step is dangerous and expensive but it's they only way to go forward.
- renewiltord 6y agoAh well, if we're seeing it that way then I propose we just build it halfway between here and Proxima Centauri.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoThey've seriously struggled to find a few million per year just to keep the thing running and do the bare minimum of maintenance (or perhaps less than the bare minimum). I think they'd be hard pressed to scrounge up the billions of dollars they'd need to put a new one on the moon
- gk1 6y agoShoot. I had the chance to see it this year but decided to drive past instead. (It is somewhat off the main road that surrounds Puerto Rico.) Granted, most of the island was still without electricity because of the M6.4 earthquake that shook the island two days before, and I had other priorities at the time (eg, tsunamis, survival)...
- rovr138 6y agoThe one in January? It was probably closed. The earthquakes did some damage. Glad to hear you at least where able to explore other areas of the island and not just San Juan and metro areas.
- briandilley 6y agoWhat a great BF4 map.
- poisonarena 6y agoI actually always thought it was abandoned since 1994, based on the first episode of the X-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Men_(The_X-Files) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Men_(The_X-Files)
- leptons 6y agoThat's what happens when teevee is your source of truth.
- mattr47 6y agoI just watch the movie Contact this past weekend. Love that telescope and the movie.
- rvense 6y agoI watch that at least once a year with my wife. It'll feel strange from now on. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself... and for that we need telescopes!
- osullivj 6y agoWonderful movie - one of my all time faves. It's based on Carl Sagan's book of the same name, which is also excellent.
- kgin 6y agoWhen I was 5 years old, I saw a pbs documentary about the Arecibo telescope. During a shot of a huge expanse of the telescope's metal, the narrator said something to the effect of "as one gets closer to the equator the sun's rays are stronger and the metal becomes too hot to touch". This, combined with the fact that I had a globe with a raised ridge around the equator, caused me to assume (for many years) that the equator was literally a metal ring that encircled the entire earth.
- mncharity 6y agoThat's delightful. The ecology of science education misconceptions is a wild and wonderful thing. My best laugh of yesterday was this page[1] from the Stanford Solar Center, saying "It is a common misconception that the Sun is yellow, or orange or even red."... now look the page header, and at the rest of the site. Gee, I wonder where students, including astronomy graduate students, might come by such misconceptions??? :) Literal lol. And yet, that's still doing better than many a colorful NASA and solar observatory outreach site, that don't even manage that sentence. I wonder, if a simple CSS radial gradient was available, to easily create a realistic image of the Sun, might people (someone; anyone) use that instead of the usual yellow circles and assorted misleading colorfulness? Something like [2], but for its suboptimal choice of white point (so whiter in the center), and maybe the rim edge isn't quite right. Perhaps homeschoolers might pick it up if it was posted... somewhere? [1] http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/SunDetermine.html http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/SunDetermine... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16622/need-help-simulating-solar-limb-darkening/16639#16639 https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16622/need-help-si...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Nition 6y agoI've noticed there seems to be a constant war over the main image on the Wikipedia page about the Sun. In 2013 there's no image[1]. In 2014 the Sun is yellow-orange[2]. In 2015 it's white[3]. In 2016 it's briefly orange again[4] before going back to white. At one point it's sort of eye-of-sauron[5]. Finally today there are two images, one white and one yellow-orange. Further down the page it's blue.[6] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=555453257 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=5554532... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=624691151 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6246911... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=688219191 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6882191... [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=704237539 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=7042375... [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=646836907 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6468369... [6]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
- MattGrommes 6y agoThis is the kind of thing I always hope that one of the billionaire nerds will help with. Seems right up Elon Musk's alley.
- pmiller2 6y agoRight, because that worked out so well for Notre Dame last year, eh? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/ruins-notre-dame-billionaires-french-philanthropy https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/ruins-...
- HarryHirsch 6y agoThis is multigenerational national infrastructure. Imagine a volatile nerd like Musk funding Goldstone or CERN. He'll get into a pissing match with someone who knows what he is talking about damn quick (remember the Thai U-boat story) and then refuse to pay further.
- mikepurvis 6y agoAbsolutely. If anything, this is the kind of thing which absolutely justifies having a nice, stable, bipartisan revenue stream directly from the tax base (along with, you know, stuff like transportation infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc). These shouldn't be the kinds of things which have to go begging for scraps from the tables of billionaires.
- CamperBob2 6y agoHe'll get into a pissing match with someone who knows what he is talking about damn quick You're being grossly uncharitable considering what he's already been able to accomplish at SpaceX. The thing about Musk is that when even 5% of his hype comes to fruition, substantial positive change follows. Can you say the same about your employer, or about yourself? Yes, in many respects he behaves like a stereotypical rich eccentric whackjob, somebody who will probably end up in Howard Hughes's old hotel suite surrounded by bottles of his own urine. It sucks that any defense of Musk inevitably has to be framed with a disclaimer like that. But like Hughes, he gets important shit done when nobody else is even willing to try, and he isn't afraid to place long bets on long shots.
- meowphius 6y agoI cannot believe they are shutting it down over a broken cable.
- brk 6y agoThat is hardly the summary. The "broken cable" is the last in a serious of maintenance issues that have gone unaddressed and piled up into making it impractical to repair at this point.
- jcranmer 6y agoIt's actually two broken cables. The second cable, before it failed, had actually been looked at, and it had been thought that it wasn't at risk of failure. So its failure meant that the structure was in more dire straits than previously thought. When highly-stressed cables under tension fail, the resulting damage can be extremely violent. The decision is to safely dismantle the instrument platform rather than risk yet another cable failing and causing less localized damage.
- ars 6y agoThe article said that they determined that if two cables broke already it means the other cables are not strong enough either. Which means replacement is the only option and apparently they decided there's no way to replace it without dismantling it.
- Johnny555 6y agoTechnically they are shutting down because they don't have the money to replace the broken cables, doing a live structural repair like that far exceeds the cost of a couple cables.
- wins32767 6y agoFor England James?
- optimalsolver 6y agoNo, for me.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tempodox 6y agoThis is truly sad news. How did it come to this? Was proper upkeep and maintenance over the years deemed too expensive? After all, everything decays over time when left alone.
- criddell 6y agoThe article suggests it was a combination of hurricanes and earthquakes that led to critical damage. Maybe a good car analogy would be if somebody ran a red light and smashed into your car. You may have been a bit behind on your car maintenance, but it was the crash that destroyed your car.
- jonahss 6y agoAnyone notice how the article's last two paragraphs are repeated
- xianhn 6y agoSad day. I worked in radio astronomy and stayed on site for a week a few years back. Amazing telescope, the scale of it has to be seen to be believed. They have had serious funding issues for some time now, so now that it needs repair, I figured they might retire it. Unfortunate for all the staff that work there, it employed quite a few people. RIP Arecibo.
- VerDeTerre 6y agoI would not have guessed the scale. The article says the instrument platform weighs 900 tons, which is amazing to imagine. At first, I wondered if they could use a helicopter to bring it down safely, but it's like two or three 747s on a tight rope.
- esoterae 6y agoHow about giant airbag and mating structures underneath the gondola, shaped-charge the cables, and then just let the air out to bring it down to the ground. Just inflating something like that would take some weight off the cables and allow a more controlled and safer process.
- Aeolun 6y agoThe platform itself looks bigger than the instruments, so maybe it’s mostly platform?
- dylan604 6y agoRIP El Radar
- unreal37 6y agoThe Arecibo Observatory is not closing. They're only dismantling that structure. They can continue to conduct science there.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThe structure holds the instruments through which they conduct science.
- boardwaalk 6y agoI loved seeing this thing when I visited PR, before the hurricane and all the rest. This makes me very sad :_(. I wonder how they could have built it to be longer-lived/more maintainable. Did they not put enough thought into cable replacement when putting a bunch of add’l load onto it? Perhaps working without enough margin? Also, it might not be intensely obvious from pictures, but this thing is in the middle of rainforest. Very humid. So it’s not all surprising it would degrade quickly. Anyways, I wonder what they’ll do with that whole space. There’s a whole visitor center and school kids coming and going every day (well, maybe not this year).
- rovr138 6y ago> So it’s not all surprising it would degrade quickly. Not surprising and easy to work into maintenance costs. The problem, like with many things on the island, is actually doing the maintenance.
- floatrock 6y agoThe thing was iconic... even if not everyone watching/playing Goldeneye knew it was a real radio telescope, it was nevertheless one of those science megaprojects that featured prominently in the popular zeitgeist and got more than one young kid excited about what's out there in the stars. But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore? Hoping a radio astronomer can chime in here. For example, I know out in New Mexico they have a distributed array of dishes (literally called the "Very Large Array", oh scientific creativity [0]) where, my understanding is, a bunch of computers stitch together all the individual signals and effectively get a resolution better than any single dish can. Is a design like that now state of the art, or does a monolithic design like Arecibo still give capabilities unique to single large dishes? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array
- beambot 6y agoWhat comes next: Hopefully lunar-based optical & radio telescopes!
- ardy42 6y ago> But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore? China already built one: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-china-world-largest-radio-telescope.html https://phys.org/news/2016-07-china-world-largest-radio-tele.... Given that it's nonmilitary US government infrastructure, I doubt it will be replaced. After all, why spend money on a telescope when the government can cut the budget to lower taxes a little bit more?
- NickBusey 6y agoI'm so bummed. I was there, almost, once. Went to Puerto Rico, drove all the way there, tiny winding road, took half the day just getting there. Turns out they were closed. Despite calling ahead and their phone message just listing the hours (which we were within). So, after all that I got to see a fence with a closed sign.
- sanguy 6y agoHow will we know when the aliens call us?
- rovr138 6y agoThey'll knock on the window instead
- mNovak 6y agoThat's too bad; glad I got a chance to visit a couple years ago. If anyone is wondering what's next: as others have noted, there's China's FAST antenna. That's a dish format telescope similar (but bigger) to Arecibo. The politics of this inevitably makes some scientists nervous. There is also the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) coming online soon. This is phased array format, similar to VLA, and covers a similar frequency band as Arecibo (unlike VLA). I have to wonder if this factored into the calculus to let Arecibo go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array
- leptons 6y agoI was in Puerto Rico for a wedding several years ago and made it an absolute non-negotiable must-visit during that trip. No way was I going to be that close and not go see it. So glad I did. It felt like mecca for science nerds. I bought all the souvenirs I could. So sad to see it go.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago> There is also the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) coming online soon. This is phased array format, similar to VLA, and covers a similar frequency band as Arecibo (unlike VLA). I have to wonder if this factored into the calculus to let Arecibo go. In some sense I'm sure it did, but the USA is not a part of the SKA collaboration, so it's not a direct replacement.
- pkamb 6y agoCradle Agent 0:34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGrFfQpY0Zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGrFfQpY0Zw
- NovemberWhiskey 6y agoSo very sad. I visited Arecibo when I was on vacation in PR with my family in 2017. The radio telescope remains one of the most unique and visually impressive things I've ever seen in my travels.
- markus_zhang 6y agoGood bye, Fox Mulder.
- aurizon 6y agoAfter reading the article, and the comments here to date, I can see there is no safe way to repair it in place. The first group of engineers failed to anticipate the further subsequent failure that occurred a little later. (raises questions about their competence). If they can safely remove valuable instruments in place for use elswehere - that is what they need to do. Looking at the corrosion everywhere, the bext solution seems to be to safely demolish it in place with explosives and salvage the site. The natural bowl it rested within, might be worth building a new bowl in?, however many advances have been made in the large arrays also described here that may well make it inferior to these arrays the day it is finished. Not being a radio astronomer - I defer to this community to make this decision. We knew you all my life, we loved the work you did, we will never forget you, Arecibo R.I.P....
- devenson 6y ago> 900 ton instrument platform Is that weight accurate? Sounds too heavy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- major505 6y agoThis are some very sad news... this thing was impressivewhen it first came.
- eastbayjake 6y agoI was today years old when I found out Arecibo is not part of the Deep Space Network! Sad for the impact to scientific research, but relieved it shouldn't jeopardize e.g., maintaining Voyager contact
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- frob 6y agoOh Arecibo, how I will miss thee. I had the luck to tour the observatory in the early teens with a physics conference. Someone pulled a few strings and we got the technical tour. It was amazing and full of facts, but two things still stick with me. First, Aricebo as a space observatory was a serendipitous accident. It was originally designed just to be an atmospheric observatory. The original idea and calculations for the dish were done in a masters thesis (maybe doctoral) and, it being the late 50s and early 60s, almost immediatly got funding just like anything else at the time with physics or science attached to it. Fast forward a few years. They build the thing and realize the student made a factor-of-10 error in his calculations, but in the right direction. Arecibo was 10x LARGER than it needed to be to do the atmospheric experiments it was designed for. Turns out, they could bounce radio waves off the moon and get a response. They could hit Mercury and hear something. They eventually could even hit Jupiter. (Side fun fact: the range was limited not by the sensitivity of the receiver, but by how far the earth rotated during the flight time of the radio waves. Anything past Jupiter and Arecibo rotated out of the receiving window before the radio burst could return.) Second, Arecibo isn't just an active radio telescope as mentioned before; it's an active microwave experiment. To study the dynamics of atmospheric plasma, Arecibo could focus microwave transmissions at different altitudes, exciting small patches of air into a plasma. It would then immediately listen to study the cooling and reionization properties of the atmosphere. Arecibo had a strong run, providing scientific insights for over 50 years. RIP, Arecibo. You maybe have been nestled in mountains down here on Earth, but you were still a Great Observatory to me.
- lambda_obrien 6y agoThat's cool as hell and why in the world are we all building stupid AI advertising platforms today?
- phendrenad2 6y agoTime to add this to the list of "wonders that we could build at some time in the past, but probably not today"?
- anonu 6y agoIts nostalgia now. I remember running Seti@Home from my dorm room back in the day and thinking about all the data this satellite was capturing.
- jron 6y agoDrone footage before the damage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1T9ZbytyFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1T9ZbytyFo
- lavp 6y agoGot to visit it while it was still operational a few years back. It was absolutely unreal, and only then did I realize that I had played it in that exact area in BF4. Really sad to see it suffered the same ironic fate as in the game.
- nappy-doo 6y agoArecibo played a non-trivial role in my decisions to go to grad school. I visited Arecibo in the early 90s (sophomore year of college). My family was in PR for a family trip, and as I'm not interested in pools or the beach (which is why my mom and sister went), my dad and I drove up into the hills to see it. It was before there was any visitor center or tours. There was a little control room with some instruments and a large window you could look in, and a catwalk over to about the edge of the telescope. There was not really much to see, and they weren't set up for people who wanted to visit. I bought a poster at local giftshop from a dusty bin of Arecibo telescope prints (I was probably the only one who bought one), and the proceeded to go off and get my advanced degree in deep space communications (coding theory and DSP). I would say seeing Arecibo was part of why. I wanted to play with toy like that. Sorry to see you, Arecibo. At least it had an effect on me.
- sbarre 6y agoAnd did you ever get a chance to play with it? If not, what is the coolest thing you've gotten to play with?
- irrational 6y agoI live in PR for a few years and drove out to see the telescope one day. This was in the days before the Internet, so I didn't know it was only open for visitors on certain days. So, I only got to the front gates. But years later I was watching an X-files episode where they had to go to the telescope. In the episode they were shown driving through a thick jungle over rutted dirt roads. Um... huh, either things had really deteriorated since I had visited or Hollywood takes a lot more artistic license than I would have assumed with something like this. Now that it is being dismantled, I'm sorry I didn't get to see it that day.
- RedOrGreen 6y agoI'm too sad today to engage with the discussion here, but I'll just mention, for those of you who think that Arecibo has either "outlived its usefulness" or been supplanted by FAST in China: Here's Arecibo on the cover of Nature in 2018: [1]. Yes, we are doing similar work at FAST as well, but one is not a replacement for the other. And here's a link to NANOGrav: [2]. I promise that you'll hear more about NANOGrav in a year or two, depending on how publication timelines work out. And it wouldn't be possible without Arecibo - now that it's gone, we have to seriously contemplate how to move on beyond our 15-year data set (already in the can). [1] https://twitter.com/nature/status/951423495107481602 https://twitter.com/nature/status/951423495107481602 [2] http://nanograv.org/ http://nanograv.org/
- ChuckMcM 6y agoWhy can't they sell off naming rights to the Observatory and just rebuild it from scratch? I don't care if it is the "Elon Musk Radio Telescope" if it means it gets rebuilt with modern equipment and materials. I'm guessing you could do the whole thing for less than $300M.
- lprd 6y agoThis is really sad news :( I remember seeing this thing in the 1997 movie Contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9DuMK0uo1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9DuMK0uo1c
- OpticalWindows 6y agoDoes anyone here know if PR would be an ideal location for space launches? It is closer to the equator and surrounded by ocean. Would conditions caused by the mountains play a non trivial role in making spaceflight and launches cheaper?
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y agoThe Virgin Islands and Anguilla are a big problem for a PR launch site. Even commercial shipping/fishing activity downrange can present a big problem for launches, let alone populated areas. The lower latitude is a minor help, but it's not huge. Higher elevation is entirely negligible; orbit is about going sideways fast, not going up. The logistic challenges of operation away from manufacturing and engineering talent in the US would far outweigh any advantages.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- conradfr 6y agoI think the Nature article is more complete: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03270-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03270-9
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThis is a real shame because since currently half the country has decided it doesn't believe in science they probably won't replace it.
- imroot 6y agoI'm a Radio Astronomy Enthusiast. I was at Big Ear the weekend before it was tore down, and it was what really prompted me to get into Radio Astronomy. It's what prompted me to visit Arecibo in the late 90's -- there wasn't much of a visitor's center, but, I was still able to get a tour by someone who was working that day. I tried to get into OSU's Electrical Engineering Program (my mentor went there, and I had made a lot of friends through him), but, my military service made it impossible for me to find a path forward at OSU, and managed to go to a small private school's engineering school instead. Radio Astronomy (and, broadcast/ham radio) really helped me shape my engineering prowess to who I am today.
- doopy1 6y agoI'm lucky to have had a chance to visit this thing. It was cyberpunk AF. A huge telescope in the jungle.
- Zenst 6y agoIf they are cunning, they will break up the dish into many sized parts and auction/sell them off to collectors, certainly be interest and would help fund the next big thing.
- joshu 6y agoAlso of note is the Arecibo Message: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message (and hilariously the Arecibo Answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message#Arecibo_answer_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message#Arecibo_answer... )
- pizzicato 6y agoArecibo features in a lovely short story by Ted Chiang, "The Great Silence": https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/ https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...
- filoeleven 6y agoDoes anyone know what purpose is served by the grid of concrete cylinders beneath the dish seen in this image? https://www.stlawu.edu/sites/default/files/Arecibo2013_15.jpg https://www.stlawu.edu/sites/default/files/Arecibo2013_15.jp...
- sjruckle 6y agoThey look like anchor points for small vertical cables running to the dish. I would guess to keep the dish from moving around when it's windy?