24 ms·

Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

776 points by BrentOzar 6y ago

makepanic 6y ago
Before and after picture from the same account: https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333747356605571072 https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333747356605571072
- paulirish 6y ago
  And just posted… pictures of the destroyed reflector dish: https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333806230125604867 https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333806230125604867
  - vidanay 6y ago
    Wow. At least one of the concrete towers appears to have completely snapped off at the last step from the top.
    - kzrdude 6y ago
      The uppermost section snapped on two of the towers and the last tower lost the two uppermost sections.
lab-notes 6y ago
Scott Manley made a pretty good video on the issues at Arecibo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE (pre collapse)
- benji_is_me 6y ago
  He just released an update video following the collapse for those interested.[1] There's also some drone footage of the remains.[2] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vchDbyIRP44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vchDbyIRP44 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRHXCWr7xt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRHXCWr7xt0
est31 6y ago
I've heard that radio astronomy was greatly supported by the military because it can be used to monitor for incoming ICBMs. I guess if Arecibo were still used for such purposes, they wouldn't have let it fall into disrepair. How is such monitoring conducted in this day and age?
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Tracking is mostly done space-based. Because of political issues. In our moon shots, we frequently had 'blackouts' in tracking the Apollo capsules because it was over unfriendly or uncooperative nations who wouldn't share their ground station data. It was my wife's school friend Marjory Bacon that headed that project. (She was also the person who turned on the Hubble telescope and initiated the first self-diagnostic)
- VLM 6y ago
  It went thru the journalist filter a million times until unrecognizable. The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing. The flightpath of most Russia to US ICBMs would never have passed over the observatory, obviously, but it was a major radar technology research site in the early years.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    >The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing. Source? This seems unlikely since ground-based visual tracking would be obscured by e.g. clouds. Is ICBM tracking all space-based and visual? (I can see why IR is useful to detect the initial boost, but it would also seem rather useless to track a small, passive object in freefall).
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      They're mostly talking about the initial launch detection which is indeed IR based because it's going to be nearly impossible to hide the signature of a rocket launch of any useful size. After that flight tracking is a lot of different sources like radar.
deleted 6y ago
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clon 6y ago
What a sad day for our species. John Michael Godier made an interesting interview with Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay regarding placing a radio telescope on the far (silent) side of Moon. Notably, our moon is also obviously devoid of the ionosphere, but what is less obvious, is that this would allow us to observe wavelengths that have so far never been studied by humans. https://youtu.be/8c8tG1sAK78 https://youtu.be/8c8tG1sAK78
- mtnygard 6y ago
  "observe wavelengths that have so far never been studied by humans" That's pretty exciting. Historically, every time we find a new way to observe the universe, we discover something that fundamentally changes our understanding. (E.g., optical astronomy put the nail in the Aristotelian model. Radio revealed that our galaxy was one of many. X-ray revealed that black holes are real, among other high energy phenomena.)
  - clon 6y ago
    That seems to be the plan, in the sense that there is no plan for what exactly to listen for. Just start listening. That said, there are some signals (like the 21cm hydrogen line) from the Universe's Dark Age that have redshifted to what we can expect to listen for in the multiple meter wavelengths, even 10m or more. But what we will learn from this? I agree with you, it will be exciting.
- Reason077 6y ago
  Additional benefit to moon telescope: No corroding moisture and wind stress to slowly degrade and eventually collapse it under the weight of 6X more gravity. Downside: Harder to get to if you do need to make repairs.
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    No wind or moisture but constant bombardment by micrometeorites. Sensitive instruments whacked by bullet-like impacts are notably hard to maintain. You could cover all sensitive systems with Whipple shields or something but that's just more mass to loft and assemble.
_ph_ 6y ago
A sad moment. Of course it didn't come surprising after recent news, still it is painful to see it collapse. Obviously, the funding had shifted to other projects some time ago or it had not fallen in disrepair. This probably means, the scientific output was less promising than those projects. Yet, beyond its immediate use, it was one of the very visible symbols of science and it hurts to see it go. I wonder whether there should be plans made for a completely new rebuild?
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  > This probably means, the scientific output was less promising than those projects. No, it means that funding prioritization is completely screwed up. Arecibo was a world-class instrument. The next largest radar telescope isn't even one-tenth as powerful. This is a giant loss and a colossal screw-up of prioritization. Building something new costs a lot more than maintaining an existing installation (they were only spending single digits millions per year on Arecibo -- nothing). And they couldn't even come up with that.
- ajford 6y ago
  Within the halls of Arecibo, it was rather well understood that the early funding/control issues that started in the mid 2000s was due to bad blood between leadership at NSF Astro and NAIC (through Cornell). Can't be proven for anything more than coincidence of course. Wikipedia has a decently comprehensive summary of the funding cutbacks Arecibo faced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#Funding_reductions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#Funding_re... They oddly enough don't mention some of the questionable things NSF AST did, like argue over Arecibo finding it's own funding: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/search-for-alien-life-ignites-battle-over-giant-telescope/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/search-for-alien-... > This probably means, the scientific output was less promising than those projects. Not true. Arecibo was by far the most powerful planetary radar system on the planet, by something like a 20x factor of sensitivity. Arecibo's size and frequency used (2.38GHz) meant that it's beam was a great compromise between beam width and strength. The narrower beams available on the remaining telescopes makes it more difficult to find elusive and not well known near-earth objects. Arecibo was contributing vast and meaningful science until it met it's untimely end. > I wonder whether there should be plans made for a completely new rebuild? Yes. Resoundingly yes. Even a comparable telescope (meaning we don't chase bigger and better like FAST) would be a massive enhancement. And with intentional planning, it would likely be possible to extend and enhance the capabilities while still reducing problems in the original design. Unfortunately, I can only imagine the hurdles in design/funding/construction that a second telescope would face.
busterarm 6y ago
I AM INVINCIBLE!
deleted 6y ago
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r721 6y ago
Drone video from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1T9ZbytyFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1T9ZbytyFo
frob 6y ago
RIP, buddy. I almost feel like I should be seeing a black banner on HN today.
- smoyer 6y ago
  That's an interesting idea ... and perhaps those of us who are skeptics and critical thinkers by nature should adopt arm-bands to indicate our support of science. These might also be useful to show opposition to climate-change deniers, anti-vaxers and flat-earthers (I'll stop there ... almost went political).
Noxmiles 6y ago
Q: Now, 007, do try to return this equipment in pristine condition. 007: I'll do my best. Q: That's what I was afraid of.
- waffle_ss 6y ago
  >>> reddit.com
thspimpolds 6y ago
As sad as this is, I'm glad the NSF didn't try to repair it now. There could have been people on the platform when it gave way.
m000 6y ago
"Too big to fail" apparently doesn't apply for science projects. To put this in perspective, at the cost of a single F-35A, Arecibo could be running for ~7y with funding at 2011 levels.
- deleted 6y ago
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- Arubis 6y ago
  And, unlike an F-35A, Arecibo has (sigh, _had_) a history of accomplishing its design goals. RIP.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    I think the F-35 is basically sorted, now, IIRC. The unit cost is down to about 85 million, which is far from cheap but roughly where a plane the does what the F-35 aims to do (As well as the different variants, the whole thing is designed to be an enormous airborne sensor fusion platform) should be.
- skuhn 6y ago
  The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The more money spent, the more people get work. That keeps people elected. Arecibo had 120 FTE employees, mostly in Puerto Rico. Politically speaking that makes it inconsequential. If you want different outcomes, then the political incentives need to be fundamentally re-aligned. [1] https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/ https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/
  - ISL 6y ago
    The FTE employee-count alone underestimates the impact of national-scale science infrastructure. naic.edu is down right now (I suspect they're busy at the moment), but their data is used by tens to hundreds of institutions, each partially employing faculty, postdocs, and students. For agencies like NSF, the science is sometimes almost secondary. What matters perhaps the most is that qualified and capable students continue to emerge from, and sustain, America's scientific institutions. Arecibo has been fighting for its fiscal life since I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s. I couldn't understand then why anyone would want to cut funding to it, as the facility is unique and capable. As a more-mature scientist, I now understand that older instruments sometimes must sadly make way for new endeavors. This collapse is a powerful moment for US radio astronomy. Will the community redirect the funds to promising new instruments, buck up and rebuild an upgraded Arecibo, or use the fleeting prominence of the moment find a way to grow the funding pie and do both? It is embarrassing for the planet's leading scientific nation to have China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 and our venerable telescope collapse without replacement in 2020. We owe it to ourselves to do better than this.
dmurray 6y ago
It might seem like they should have more redundancy - one cable broke, then a second, and just a week later the whole thing falls apart - but for structures held in place by tension it doesn't work like that. A bicycle wheel has redundant spokes: you could design a wheel with 66% of the typical number of spokes and it would work OK. But if you do break a spoke, the wheel will start deforming straight away. If you can't replace the spoke, one piece of advice is to loosen the spoke directly opposite the broken one to even out the distribution of force.
- bipson 6y ago
  This is not a matter of incompetence. They even had auxiliary cables installed some time ago, one of these was the first to fail. All well-known best practices don't matter if structures cannot be maintained because the governing bodies deny the necessary funding for maintenance/repairs/operation. In a sense Arecibo was knowingly "given up".
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Well, there was a bit of incompetence. The auxiliary cable was almost certainly installed incorrectly and the failure mode that occurred (cable slipped out of its socket) would not have happened if best practices were followed. But it was installed on the cheap: if they'd had more money they would likely have paid for more diligent engineers. After all, they built it pretty well the first time round. So at some level, yeah, the root cause is a lack of funds.
    - olsonjeffery 6y ago
      >Well, there was a bit of incompetence. Where? What evidence do you have for such a claim? >The auxiliary cable was almost certainly installed incorrectly Are you almost certain? How do you know? What stopped you from being completely certain? >and the failure mode that occurred (cable slipped out of its socket) would not have happened if best practices were followed. Are you a radio observatory specialist? Please share! Looking at your submission and comment history, you don't appear to have any special expertise at all. Curious where your very specific and definite pronouncements arise from. >But it was installed on the cheap Again: What's your evidence for this claim? And inferring this from historical under-funding isn't a satisfactory answer. >So at some level, yeah, the root cause is a lack of funds. Kind of strange to make all of those claims above and then come out and just plainly state this at the conclusion. You've made lots of claims and I think you're just talking out of your ass. If that's the case, your comments are shameful and inappropriate.
Rooster61 6y ago
So, one thing that isn't clear to me. They were already planning to decommission the structure, so was this a planned collapse, or did this happen literally right after their announcement by coincidence? If its the latter, I'm very glad they made the call to not try to fix this thing. It would have been so much more tragic had someone been up on the sub-reflector/instrument assembly. Good call by the powers that be to keep it clear.
- Macha 6y ago
  My understanding is the fact that this was possible (even likely) was why they decided not to attempt repairs. Basically, the second cable should not have snapped if it was still at design strength, so its failure put the strength of the others (and hence the entire structure) in doubt.
  - Rooster61 6y ago
    I might not have been clear in my comment. I understand why they didn't go up and repair it. I just wasn't sure if if they decided to go ahead and demo it or if it fell under its own weight just a week or so after they decided to not try to fix it. That much isn't clear from the articles I have been able to find through a quick google.
    - Macha 6y ago
      Every article I've found indicates it was an unintentional collapse, but they're mostly sourced to the unidentified "officials and locals" from the AP report, which may just be the original tweet and replies. EDIT: NSF confirms it was an unplanned collapse that happened overnight: https://twitter.com/NSF/status/1333772980539691008 https://twitter.com/NSF/status/1333772980539691008
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Unplanned. "Unscheduled rapid disassembly", as it's sometimes phrased. Though widely anticipated.
rjmunro 6y ago
Is this picture real? I don't get why there isn't any evidence of bits of cables still hanging from at least one of the towers or any other kind of wreckage. It looks more like someone has photoshopped all the cables out of of an old photo.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  You're right but, it looks like the smoke/dust comes from the anchor points of the cables, so the ground part gave way and all cables were collapsed cleanly. Another angle is https://twitter.com/adamonzon/status/1333742939005218816/photo/1 https://twitter.com/adamonzon/status/1333742939005218816/pho... Also looks like "cable hubs" at the top of support towers are gone too.
- deleted 6y ago
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- kzrdude 6y ago
  You can see that the top of each tower has come off, so none of them are standing as tall as they were. Still, sure, it looks like a serene picture apart from the dust in the air. Comparison before/after pic https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoJsJl0XUAI3XfT?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoJsJl0XUAI3XfT?format=jpg&name=...
  - CommieBobDole 6y ago
    You can also see that the building just to the right of the nearest tower is damaged, presumably due to cables or part of the tower landing on it.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ajford 6y ago
  You may have seen this already, but here's some more direct photos of the collapsed pieces. https://twitter.com/NotiJuan/status/1333803305831604225 https://twitter.com/NotiJuan/status/1333803305831604225
lowtech 6y ago
Did it fall apart or was demolished?
- ragebol 6y ago
  It collapsed, unplanned but not unexpected.
deleted 6y ago
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rurban 6y ago
So planetary defense relies solely on a few 1m telescopes. Interesting. Maybe the "Dish" (Australia) also. The two remaining big ones, the chinese and the russian cannot do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance The remaining bigs: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600
- fanf2 6y ago
  I am not sure what you mean by “planetary defence”? One of the unusual things about Arecibo was that it could transmit as well as receive (like The Dish / Parkes telescope); that work is mostly done by the NASA deep space network, which uses fairly large steerable telescopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network
  - nikisweeting 6y ago
    Pretty sure parent is referring to asteroid & space debris trajectory tracking, which Arecibo was used for.
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    NASA uses "planetary defense" to refer to activities related to detection of dangerous asteroids. The DSN is used for communication with our various satellites and probes outside of Earth orbit. AFAIK, it doesn't play a role in radio astronomy of the kind Arecibo did.
  - ajford 6y ago
    Arecibo's S-Band radar was extensively used in the tracking of near-Earth asteroids, which was termed "planetary defense" by NASA. It was nearly 20x more sensitive than any other telescope capable of radar tracking. https://www.space.com/arecibo-observatory-loss-for-planetary-defense-asteroids https://www.space.com/arecibo-observatory-loss-for-planetary...
- 6y ago
delecti 6y ago
To clarify, "has collapsed" or "was collapsed"? I had heard they were planning to actively decommission it out of concerns for safety, and I don't trust that level of nuance from the auto-translate.
- theFco 6y ago
  The message says that it is a message that's announced with great sadness, as one says when someone passes away. I do not think that language would be used if the structure was being decommissioned in a controlled way (Note: Spanish is my first language).
  - delecti 6y ago
    I don't think it would be any less sad if it was a deliberate decommissioning.
- thspimpolds 6y ago
  the NSF confirmed the cables failed sometime over night, this wasn't the planned decommissioning. They noticed with drone flights the cable exteriors which remained on tower 4 were showing pre-failure conditions over the past few days.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I think it was unplanned, but not unexpected. In any case, what's done, is done. As Clay would say "Ain't no puttin' the candy back in that piñata."
SeeManDo 6y ago
Great! Now they can replace it with something new instead of trying to salvage outdated equipment, software and engineers!
- Accujack 6y ago
  The equipment has never really been outdated. It's been updated as the telescope has operated, since the antenna itself hasn't needed updating. Computers and software included. Until this collapse, the management was actually hoping to save all the instrumentation located in the suspended focal point of the dish - it was all useful, and much if it was quite up to date and not easily replaced. It's unlikely in the present political climate it will be replaced, regardless.
- space_ghost 6y ago
  Outdated engineers?
  - SeeManDo 6y ago
    Those engineers job security might be the only reason that "the equipment has never really been outdated"
- deleted 6y ago
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- beezle 6y ago
  Is there still a use case for a new dish built into the same natural bowl? Why not build somewhere else? If there had never been an Arecibo at that location would someone actually pick it today to site a new scope? Not trying to diss all that has been accomplished with Arecibo just wonder if there are not better places to direct funding, assuming it can be found.
  - dralley 6y ago
    Both you and OP are missing the point. This will not be replaced - not because there is no scientific value in doing so - but because there is no political motivation for doing so. Most if not all of these radio telescopes (including Aricebo) were built in the 60s and 70s with military funding. Science was never the driving motivation for building them -- intercepting Soviet radio communications was.
est31 6y ago
I've wondered about the exact time of the collapse. Apparently there is a seismic observatory only tens of meters away from the telescope dish. The station code is AOPR [0]. After retrieving the mseed data from the web API using curl, and installing obspy from pip, I could plot the events. This is the result: [1]. You can see two "events". One at Nov 30, 23:12 UTC, and a second, larger one at Dec 1st, 11:52 UTC. Upon closer inspection, the first event is actually multiple smaller ones, not sure if they are related to the collapse at all. The second event is clearly one discrete thing though. The image was uploaded to twitter at 11:56 UTC, so minutes within the collapse being recorded on the seismograph. You can still see the dust in the air. Pretty cool that all this data is out there, in the open, just a curl request away. [0]: https://www.fdsn.org/networks/detail/PR/ https://www.fdsn.org/networks/detail/PR/ [1]: Note on some of the screenshots I've preprocessed the data with a lowpass filter st.filter("lowpass", freq=0.1, corners=2) to make it look nicer, while in others I haven't. I'm just an interested person, not doing this on a scientific level. https://imgur.com/a/FjrbWWa https://imgur.com/a/FjrbWWa
- leephillips 6y ago
  Interesting! You should write this up. Your comment has more content than most Medium articles that I’ve seen.
  - est31 6y ago
    Thanks! I mainly just googled together this stuff in a matter of 1-2 hours. So it was an afternoon project :). But maybe I'll write it into a nice format. It wasn't trivial because the WWW interfaces only show earthquakes but this event was likely only registered by one station and had too low magnitude to be registered by others, and was thus filtered out.
- prionassembly 6y ago
  Any hints on finding seismic data from elsewhere in the world? There was a small event in South America yesterday I'd love to hit with data sciency stuff.
  - 6y ago
DamnInteresting 6y ago
Photo of the wreckage from above: https://twitter.com/ruperto1023/status/1333791522269978626/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ruperto1023/status/1333791522269978626/p...
minimuffins 6y ago
Sad news. Perfect symbol of the collapse of modernity into postmodernity. All that's left of massive public science and exploration projects, abandoned, deteriorating artifacts of the past.
hedora 6y ago
"I look forward to the day when the schools automatically receive the funds they need and the Pentagon holds bake sales to buy tanks." - Terry Herndon
- nickff 6y ago
  A lot more money is spent on education than on the military in the USA (where education is funded by three levels of government), and most other countries.
  - hedora 6y ago
    US education spending is about 20-30% more than military spending, but the money is not well-allocated. Most funding is from local taxes, which vary greatly from school to school, and sometimes from year to year. https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2021USbn_22bs2#usgs302 https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2021USbn_...
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      In fairness, the military spending probably is also not well-allocated...
alexvoda 6y ago
Would it be possible in the future to build such a telescope in an impact crater like Meteor Crater, Arizona (1)? Or is the shape or geology of an impact crater unsuitable for such an instrument? (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater
Tsiklon 6y ago
This makes me profoundly sad; such an iconic structure built for the betterment of all of us, allowed to decay, rot, and collapse. Even if it was past it's point of utility the structure itself was a modern icon of design. To be hyperbolic about such things, it feels like another milestone in the path to endarkenment
btbuildem 6y ago
Arecibo was in the news recently, regarding it's decommissioning and controlled dismantling [0]. Here's a more detailed account of the collapse [1]. Looks like they called it, and it just happened quicker than expected. [0]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/famed-arecibo-telescope-brink-collapse-will-be-dismantled https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/famed-arecibo-telesc... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observatory-platform-collapse-dish-puerto-rico-telescope https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observat...
dredmorbius 6y ago
Other coverage (from HN submissions): https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/arecibo-radio-telescopes-massive-instrument-platform-has-collapsed/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/arecibo-radio-telesc... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arecibo-observatory-radio-telescope-puerto-rico-collapses/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arecibo-observatory-radio-teles... https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observatory-platform-collapse-dish-puerto-rico-telescope https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observat... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/huge-loss-huge-puerto-rico-radio-telescope-arecibo-collapses-following-n1249515 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/huge-loss-huge-puerto-ri... https://twitter.com/jivevlbi/status/1333764894454374400 https://twitter.com/jivevlbi/status/1333764894454374400
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/space/arecibo-telescope-puerto-rico.html#click=https://t.co/VqFJn0ypim https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/space/arecibo-tel...
eightysixfour 6y ago
I can't separate thinking about Arecibo from thinking about the short story "The Great Silence" by Ted Chiang, which is available freely here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/ https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia... Sad to see this experiment come to an end.
supernova87a 6y ago
Someone must have set up a webcam to capture the impending failure?
tim333 6y ago
Seems to have collapsed a while ago if James Bond films are anything to go by https://youtu.be/jp9tENRDVzA?t=313 https://youtu.be/jp9tENRDVzA?t=313 Actually the Bond shot gives a good impression of how big the thing is.
carabiner 6y ago
When will this year end? Why has God forsaken us?
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  Or maybe the question is why we forsook him?
- chr1 6y ago
  In two months you'll be asking why did that year end. God was so kind to us back then.
  - carabiner 6y ago
    You know this how? What is in store for us in 2021?
jdofaz 6y ago
2020 keeps on giving...
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  OK, things are starting to make sense. It's an alien attack. They created Covid to distract us enough that we wouldn't defend Arecibo. And they're driving Trump insane with their mind control rays just to increase the chaos. /s, in case anyone couldn't tell...
  - hedora 6y ago
    Too soon on the mind control ray thing. The Russians are allegedly microwaving the brains of CIA agents and their families, and the intelligence community is waiting until Trump is gone to mount a response. Citation (and perhaps tin foil hat) obviously required: https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-microwave-attacks https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-micro...
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      They think that Biden is going to be more likely to allow a response? That seems... improbable.
1auralynn 6y ago
Over 15 years of the US defunding basic research is taking its toll...
cambalache 6y ago
The fact that they let it collapse so bad instead of properly decommissioning it does not look on America, or at least America's treatment of PR.
ilamont 6y ago
I just did a simple calculation of the weight of the instrument platform, listed at 900 tons. The maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is just over 500,000 pounds, or 250 tons ... so the instrument platform was the equivalent of three fully loaded 787s, plus two M1A1 tanks piled on for good measure.
dang 6y ago
Previous threads of this story: 12 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151342 21 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045573 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149346 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
dang 6y ago
We changed the URL from https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333741751069192195 https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333741751069192195 to an article with more background info, albeit mostly from Twitter. Other sources (via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Arecibo&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...): https://www.npr.org/2020/12/01/940767001/arecibo-observatory-telescope-collapses-ending-an-era-of-world-class-research https://www.npr.org/2020/12/01/940767001/arecibo-observatory... https://twitter.com/ProfAbelMendez/status/1333807156051775488 https://twitter.com/ProfAbelMendez/status/133380715605177548... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/space/arecibo-telescope-puerto-rico.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/space/arecibo-tel... https://apnews.com/article/technology-arecibo-observatory-puerto-rico-science--0da6abb251f455977bf0c752348e712e https://apnews.com/article/technology-arecibo-observatory-pu... https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observatory-platform-collapse-dish-puerto-rico-telescope https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observat...
briancp 6y ago
A shame. Beyond the loss to science, the equipment itself was impressive. A 900-ton observation platform is like a multistory building suspended a few hundred feet in the air, in the middle of the jungle. An interesting gallery of the telescope being constructed is here: https://www.naic.edu/history_gal/historicgal.html https://www.naic.edu/history_gal/historicgal.html
softwaredoug 6y ago
Related their store is still open and even had a Cyber Monday sale https://shop.areciboobservatory.org/ https://shop.areciboobservatory.org/
- throwanem 6y ago
  Ah, it's a good time to pick out something nice from the Fall Collection. https://shop.areciboobservatory.org/collections/ao-fall-collection https://shop.areciboobservatory.org/collections/ao-fall-coll...
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    You put the pun in punk.
Noumenon72 6y ago
They knew it was coming down for months and they couldn't set up a webcam to entertain Reddit for five seconds?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Strictly speaking, it wasn't until the second cable broke about a month ago that its high risk of collapse was expected, and the engineering report itself took two weeks after the second break.
doctat 6y ago
The logical thing to do here is to simply rebuild it, right? I mean all the infrastructure is there. Power, networking, housing, staff, etc., etc. Like there couldn’t ever be a more convenient place to drop a similar type of instrument, right? And it seems that the towers are still up, surely the anchors for the cables are no worse for wear. The actual dish itself looks to be composed of a bunch of panels that are probably designed for easy replacement. And most of them seem to still be intact. Just string up a newer, lighter weight, more powerful state of the art instrument array on a newer, stronger, lighter set of cables. Or am I missing something obvious?
- shadowofneptune 6y ago
  There is no money for this. The National Science Foundation, the primary source of funding for Arecibo, has been trying to shut it down or offset its cost for years. NSF is a part of the US government, so it has been a victim of the cuts to public science that have affected universities and institutions across the US since the end of the Cold War and the Great Recession. You are right that it would be simple, but there was nobody willing to fund it until it was too late. That is the real tragedy here, Arecibo was killed over the course of years.
  - casefields 6y ago
    >NSF victim of cuts to public science Why is this completely erroneous fact believed by so many people? Other than a 1 time injection due to the 2008 crisis, NSF funding increases nearly every year and is currently at its second highest budget ever: https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFRqstAppropHist/NSFRequestsandAppropriationsHistory.pdf https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFRqstAppropHist/NSFRequestsand...
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      Counterpoint: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2019/pdf/40b_fy2019.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2019/pdf/40b_fy2019.pdf In FY2019 NSF reduced its budget for Arecibo from $8M to $6.08M a 24% reduction in support for this instrument.
cs702 6y ago
2020. :-(
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
You did good Arecibo. Friend of an era.
dukeofdoom 6y ago
I was there 10 years ago. I have some video and photos from the observatory. Was pretty awesome place to visit. One of a kind in the wold. But even back then some of the panels looked damaged. Hard to imagine that an observatory of such scientific importance, would be neglected and allowed to rust away until cable break. Trump Created The Space Force, and bragged about how much money he gave Puerto Rico after the hurricane. Large projects like this need ongoing government funding. So I'm surprised more was not done to prevent this. Similar things happened during collapse of the USSR. Major scientific projects just got left behind to rust. I know that China built a new larger radio telescope, but this one could send out messages. The observatory helped us map planets, find pulsars, track asteroids, and send messages to aliens. Arecibo message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message#Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message#Numbers
- mrtksn 6y ago
  >Similar things happened during collapse of the USSR. Major scientific projects just got left behind to rust. It's fascinating to think about it. Some projects like advanced rocket engines were salvaged by people who care and other projects like the Buran shuttle were left to rot and destroyed by petty stuff like rooftop collapse. At the end though, maybe it's just a natural selection process. Arguably, saving the Buran might have turned into an expensive mistake considering the fate of US shuttle program.
  - fuoqi 6y ago
    Unfortunately termination of the Buran project also led to discontinuation of the Energia rocket [0]. It was quite a marvelous rocket and could've been used without Buran in the Polyus configuration. And in the late 80s there was even a modification in development with airplane-like reusable boosters. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia
    - philistine 6y ago
      The initial impetus for the Buran was a desire to match capabilities with the US. Unfortunately, it’s not surprising that a rocket meant for such a political purpose fell to the wayside after the fall of the Soviet system.
acvny 6y ago
Decommisioning work might have been too expensive.
lightlyused 6y ago
My Spanish sucks, but here is a video from some of the Staff at the telescope. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CIQsBa2H3kg/?igshid=gkczuoe5ud4l https://www.instagram.com/tv/CIQsBa2H3kg/?igshid=gkczuoe5ud4...
robissan 6y ago
Reports from PR are saying that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had lost interest in the telescope years ago and had rendered the project obsolete. I guess time will tell.
robissan 6y ago
Apparently the National Science Foundation (NSF) lost interest in the project years ago and had rendered the observatory obsolete. I guess time will tell if this is true or not.
pryelluw 6y ago
My father drove me there on a whim when I was about 6 years old and asking about about it. We lived about an hour and a half away.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Ok can we replace it with 10,000 individuals around the world with 1 sq meter receivers? Each one providing a pixel in an enormous virtual dish?
yangvz 6y ago
China!

776 points by BrentOzar 6y ago

Before and after picture from the same account: https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333747356605571072 https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333747356605571072

paulirish 6y ago
And just posted… pictures of the destroyed reflector dish: https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333806230125604867 https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333806230125604867
- vidanay 6y ago
  Wow. At least one of the concrete towers appears to have completely snapped off at the last step from the top.
  - kzrdude 6y ago
    The uppermost section snapped on two of the towers and the last tower lost the two uppermost sections.

lab-notes 6y ago

Scott Manley made a pretty good video on the issues at Arecibo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE (pre collapse)

benji_is_me 6y ago
He just released an update video following the collapse for those interested.[1] There's also some drone footage of the remains.[2] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vchDbyIRP44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vchDbyIRP44 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRHXCWr7xt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRHXCWr7xt0

est31 6y ago

I've heard that radio astronomy was greatly supported by the military because it can be used to monitor for incoming ICBMs. I guess if Arecibo were still used for such purposes, they wouldn't have let it fall into disrepair. How is such monitoring conducted in this day and age?

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Tracking is mostly done space-based. Because of political issues. In our moon shots, we frequently had 'blackouts' in tracking the Apollo capsules because it was over unfriendly or uncooperative nations who wouldn't share their ground station data. It was my wife's school friend Marjory Bacon that headed that project. (She was also the person who turned on the Hubble telescope and initiated the first self-diagnostic)
VLM 6y ago
It went thru the journalist filter a million times until unrecognizable. The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing. The flightpath of most Russia to US ICBMs would never have passed over the observatory, obviously, but it was a major radar technology research site in the early years.
- javajosh 6y ago
  >The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing. Source? This seems unlikely since ground-based visual tracking would be obscured by e.g. clouds. Is ICBM tracking all space-based and visual? (I can see why IR is useful to detect the initial boost, but it would also seem rather useless to track a small, passive object in freefall).
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    They're mostly talking about the initial launch detection which is indeed IR based because it's going to be nearly impossible to hide the signature of a rocket launch of any useful size. After that flight tracking is a lot of different sources like radar.

deleted 6y ago

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clon 6y ago

What a sad day for our species. John Michael Godier made an interesting interview with Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay regarding placing a radio telescope on the far (silent) side of Moon. Notably, our moon is also obviously devoid of the ionosphere, but what is less obvious, is that this would allow us to observe wavelengths that have so far never been studied by humans. https://youtu.be/8c8tG1sAK78 https://youtu.be/8c8tG1sAK78

mtnygard 6y ago
"observe wavelengths that have so far never been studied by humans" That's pretty exciting. Historically, every time we find a new way to observe the universe, we discover something that fundamentally changes our understanding. (E.g., optical astronomy put the nail in the Aristotelian model. Radio revealed that our galaxy was one of many. X-ray revealed that black holes are real, among other high energy phenomena.)
- clon 6y ago
  That seems to be the plan, in the sense that there is no plan for what exactly to listen for. Just start listening. That said, there are some signals (like the 21cm hydrogen line) from the Universe's Dark Age that have redshifted to what we can expect to listen for in the multiple meter wavelengths, even 10m or more. But what we will learn from this? I agree with you, it will be exciting.
Reason077 6y ago
Additional benefit to moon telescope: No corroding moisture and wind stress to slowly degrade and eventually collapse it under the weight of 6X more gravity. Downside: Harder to get to if you do need to make repairs.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  No wind or moisture but constant bombardment by micrometeorites. Sensitive instruments whacked by bullet-like impacts are notably hard to maintain. You could cover all sensitive systems with Whipple shields or something but that's just more mass to loft and assemble.

_ph_ 6y ago

A sad moment. Of course it didn't come surprising after recent news, still it is painful to see it collapse. Obviously, the funding had shifted to other projects some time ago or it had not fallen in disrepair. This probably means, the scientific output was less promising than those projects. Yet, beyond its immediate use, it was one of the very visible symbols of science and it hurts to see it go. I wonder whether there should be plans made for a completely new rebuild?

CydeWeys 6y ago
> This probably means, the scientific output was less promising than those projects. No, it means that funding prioritization is completely screwed up. Arecibo was a world-class instrument. The next largest radar telescope isn't even one-tenth as powerful. This is a giant loss and a colossal screw-up of prioritization. Building something new costs a lot more than maintaining an existing installation (they were only spending single digits millions per year on Arecibo -- nothing). And they couldn't even come up with that.
ajford 6y ago
Within the halls of Arecibo, it was rather well understood that the early funding/control issues that started in the mid 2000s was due to bad blood between leadership at NSF Astro and NAIC (through Cornell). Can't be proven for anything more than coincidence of course. Wikipedia has a decently comprehensive summary of the funding cutbacks Arecibo faced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#Funding_reductions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#Funding_re... They oddly enough don't mention some of the questionable things NSF AST did, like argue over Arecibo finding it's own funding: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/search-for-alien-life-ignites-battle-over-giant-telescope/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/search-for-alien-... > This probably means, the scientific output was less promising than those projects. Not true. Arecibo was by far the most powerful planetary radar system on the planet, by something like a 20x factor of sensitivity. Arecibo's size and frequency used (2.38GHz) meant that it's beam was a great compromise between beam width and strength. The narrower beams available on the remaining telescopes makes it more difficult to find elusive and not well known near-earth objects. Arecibo was contributing vast and meaningful science until it met it's untimely end. > I wonder whether there should be plans made for a completely new rebuild? Yes. Resoundingly yes. Even a comparable telescope (meaning we don't chase bigger and better like FAST) would be a massive enhancement. And with intentional planning, it would likely be possible to extend and enhance the capabilities while still reducing problems in the original design. Unfortunately, I can only imagine the hurdles in design/funding/construction that a second telescope would face.

busterarm 6y ago

I AM INVINCIBLE!

deleted 6y ago

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r721 6y ago

Drone video from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1T9ZbytyFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1T9ZbytyFo

frob 6y ago

RIP, buddy. I almost feel like I should be seeing a black banner on HN today.

smoyer 6y ago
That's an interesting idea ... and perhaps those of us who are skeptics and critical thinkers by nature should adopt arm-bands to indicate our support of science. These might also be useful to show opposition to climate-change deniers, anti-vaxers and flat-earthers (I'll stop there ... almost went political).

Noxmiles 6y ago

Q: Now, 007, do try to return this equipment in pristine condition. 007: I'll do my best. Q: That's what I was afraid of.

waffle_ss 6y ago
>>> reddit.com

thspimpolds 6y ago

As sad as this is, I'm glad the NSF didn't try to repair it now. There could have been people on the platform when it gave way.

m000 6y ago

"Too big to fail" apparently doesn't apply for science projects. To put this in perspective, at the cost of a single F-35A, Arecibo could be running for ~7y with funding at 2011 levels.

deleted 6y ago
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Arubis 6y ago
And, unlike an F-35A, Arecibo has (sigh, _had_) a history of accomplishing its design goals. RIP.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  I think the F-35 is basically sorted, now, IIRC. The unit cost is down to about 85 million, which is far from cheap but roughly where a plane the does what the F-35 aims to do (As well as the different variants, the whole thing is designed to be an enormous airborne sensor fusion platform) should be.
skuhn 6y ago
The problem (partly) is that the F-35 program puts money into 307 congressional districts in 45 states [1]. These insanely expensive defense projects are wealth transfer programs that make contractors like Lockheed and their many sub-contractors rich, and also create jobs in these communities. That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The more money spent, the more people get work. That keeps people elected. Arecibo had 120 FTE employees, mostly in Puerto Rico. Politically speaking that makes it inconsequential. If you want different outcomes, then the political incentives need to be fundamentally re-aligned. [1] https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/ https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/
- ISL 6y ago
  The FTE employee-count alone underestimates the impact of national-scale science infrastructure. naic.edu is down right now (I suspect they're busy at the moment), but their data is used by tens to hundreds of institutions, each partially employing faculty, postdocs, and students. For agencies like NSF, the science is sometimes almost secondary. What matters perhaps the most is that qualified and capable students continue to emerge from, and sustain, America's scientific institutions. Arecibo has been fighting for its fiscal life since I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s. I couldn't understand then why anyone would want to cut funding to it, as the facility is unique and capable. As a more-mature scientist, I now understand that older instruments sometimes must sadly make way for new endeavors. This collapse is a powerful moment for US radio astronomy. Will the community redirect the funds to promising new instruments, buck up and rebuild an upgraded Arecibo, or use the fleeting prominence of the moment find a way to grow the funding pie and do both? It is embarrassing for the planet's leading scientific nation to have China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 and our venerable telescope collapse without replacement in 2020. We owe it to ourselves to do better than this.

dmurray 6y ago

It might seem like they should have more redundancy - one cable broke, then a second, and just a week later the whole thing falls apart - but for structures held in place by tension it doesn't work like that. A bicycle wheel has redundant spokes: you could design a wheel with 66% of the typical number of spokes and it would work OK. But if you do break a spoke, the wheel will start deforming straight away. If you can't replace the spoke, one piece of advice is to loosen the spoke directly opposite the broken one to even out the distribution of force.

bipson 6y ago
This is not a matter of incompetence. They even had auxiliary cables installed some time ago, one of these was the first to fail. All well-known best practices don't matter if structures cannot be maintained because the governing bodies deny the necessary funding for maintenance/repairs/operation. In a sense Arecibo was knowingly "given up".
- dmurray 6y ago
  Well, there was a bit of incompetence. The auxiliary cable was almost certainly installed incorrectly and the failure mode that occurred (cable slipped out of its socket) would not have happened if best practices were followed. But it was installed on the cheap: if they'd had more money they would likely have paid for more diligent engineers. After all, they built it pretty well the first time round. So at some level, yeah, the root cause is a lack of funds.
  - olsonjeffery 6y ago
    >Well, there was a bit of incompetence. Where? What evidence do you have for such a claim? >The auxiliary cable was almost certainly installed incorrectly Are you almost certain? How do you know? What stopped you from being completely certain? >and the failure mode that occurred (cable slipped out of its socket) would not have happened if best practices were followed. Are you a radio observatory specialist? Please share! Looking at your submission and comment history, you don't appear to have any special expertise at all. Curious where your very specific and definite pronouncements arise from. >But it was installed on the cheap Again: What's your evidence for this claim? And inferring this from historical under-funding isn't a satisfactory answer. >So at some level, yeah, the root cause is a lack of funds. Kind of strange to make all of those claims above and then come out and just plainly state this at the conclusion. You've made lots of claims and I think you're just talking out of your ass. If that's the case, your comments are shameful and inappropriate.

Rooster61 6y ago

So, one thing that isn't clear to me. They were already planning to decommission the structure, so was this a planned collapse, or did this happen literally right after their announcement by coincidence? If its the latter, I'm very glad they made the call to not try to fix this thing. It would have been so much more tragic had someone been up on the sub-reflector/instrument assembly. Good call by the powers that be to keep it clear.

Macha 6y ago
My understanding is the fact that this was possible (even likely) was why they decided not to attempt repairs. Basically, the second cable should not have snapped if it was still at design strength, so its failure put the strength of the others (and hence the entire structure) in doubt.
- Rooster61 6y ago
  I might not have been clear in my comment. I understand why they didn't go up and repair it. I just wasn't sure if if they decided to go ahead and demo it or if it fell under its own weight just a week or so after they decided to not try to fix it. That much isn't clear from the articles I have been able to find through a quick google.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Every article I've found indicates it was an unintentional collapse, but they're mostly sourced to the unidentified "officials and locals" from the AP report, which may just be the original tweet and replies. EDIT: NSF confirms it was an unplanned collapse that happened overnight: https://twitter.com/NSF/status/1333772980539691008 https://twitter.com/NSF/status/1333772980539691008
dredmorbius 6y ago
Unplanned. "Unscheduled rapid disassembly", as it's sometimes phrased. Though widely anticipated.

rjmunro 6y ago

Is this picture real? I don't get why there isn't any evidence of bits of cables still hanging from at least one of the towers or any other kind of wreckage. It looks more like someone has photoshopped all the cables out of of an old photo.

bayindirh 6y ago
You're right but, it looks like the smoke/dust comes from the anchor points of the cables, so the ground part gave way and all cables were collapsed cleanly. Another angle is https://twitter.com/adamonzon/status/1333742939005218816/photo/1 https://twitter.com/adamonzon/status/1333742939005218816/pho... Also looks like "cable hubs" at the top of support towers are gone too.
deleted 6y ago
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kzrdude 6y ago
You can see that the top of each tower has come off, so none of them are standing as tall as they were. Still, sure, it looks like a serene picture apart from the dust in the air. Comparison before/after pic https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoJsJl0XUAI3XfT?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EoJsJl0XUAI3XfT?format=jpg&name=...
- CommieBobDole 6y ago
  You can also see that the building just to the right of the nearest tower is damaged, presumably due to cables or part of the tower landing on it.
deleted 6y ago
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ajford 6y ago
You may have seen this already, but here's some more direct photos of the collapsed pieces. https://twitter.com/NotiJuan/status/1333803305831604225 https://twitter.com/NotiJuan/status/1333803305831604225

lowtech 6y ago

Did it fall apart or was demolished?

ragebol 6y ago
It collapsed, unplanned but not unexpected.

deleted 6y ago

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rurban 6y ago

So planetary defense relies solely on a few 1m telescopes. Interesting. Maybe the "Dish" (Australia) also. The two remaining big ones, the chinese and the russian cannot do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance The remaining bigs: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600

fanf2 6y ago
I am not sure what you mean by “planetary defence”? One of the unusual things about Arecibo was that it could transmit as well as receive (like The Dish / Parkes telescope); that work is mostly done by the NASA deep space network, which uses fairly large steerable telescopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network
- nikisweeting 6y ago
  Pretty sure parent is referring to asteroid & space debris trajectory tracking, which Arecibo was used for.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  NASA uses "planetary defense" to refer to activities related to detection of dangerous asteroids. The DSN is used for communication with our various satellites and probes outside of Earth orbit. AFAIK, it doesn't play a role in radio astronomy of the kind Arecibo did.
- ajford 6y ago
  Arecibo's S-Band radar was extensively used in the tracking of near-Earth asteroids, which was termed "planetary defense" by NASA. It was nearly 20x more sensitive than any other telescope capable of radar tracking. https://www.space.com/arecibo-observatory-loss-for-planetary-defense-asteroids https://www.space.com/arecibo-observatory-loss-for-planetary...
6y ago

delecti 6y ago

To clarify, "has collapsed" or "was collapsed"? I had heard they were planning to actively decommission it out of concerns for safety, and I don't trust that level of nuance from the auto-translate.

theFco 6y ago
The message says that it is a message that's announced with great sadness, as one says when someone passes away. I do not think that language would be used if the structure was being decommissioned in a controlled way (Note: Spanish is my first language).
- delecti 6y ago
  I don't think it would be any less sad if it was a deliberate decommissioning.
thspimpolds 6y ago
the NSF confirmed the cables failed sometime over night, this wasn't the planned decommissioning. They noticed with drone flights the cable exteriors which remained on tower 4 were showing pre-failure conditions over the past few days.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I think it was unplanned, but not unexpected. In any case, what's done, is done. As Clay would say "Ain't no puttin' the candy back in that piñata."

SeeManDo 6y ago

Great! Now they can replace it with something new instead of trying to salvage outdated equipment, software and engineers!

Accujack 6y ago
The equipment has never really been outdated. It's been updated as the telescope has operated, since the antenna itself hasn't needed updating. Computers and software included. Until this collapse, the management was actually hoping to save all the instrumentation located in the suspended focal point of the dish - it was all useful, and much if it was quite up to date and not easily replaced. It's unlikely in the present political climate it will be replaced, regardless.
space_ghost 6y ago
Outdated engineers?
- SeeManDo 6y ago
  Those engineers job security might be the only reason that "the equipment has never really been outdated"
deleted 6y ago
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beezle 6y ago
Is there still a use case for a new dish built into the same natural bowl? Why not build somewhere else? If there had never been an Arecibo at that location would someone actually pick it today to site a new scope? Not trying to diss all that has been accomplished with Arecibo just wonder if there are not better places to direct funding, assuming it can be found.
- dralley 6y ago
  Both you and OP are missing the point. This will not be replaced - not because there is no scientific value in doing so - but because there is no political motivation for doing so. Most if not all of these radio telescopes (including Aricebo) were built in the 60s and 70s with military funding. Science was never the driving motivation for building them -- intercepting Soviet radio communications was.

est31 6y ago

I've wondered about the exact time of the collapse. Apparently there is a seismic observatory only tens of meters away from the telescope dish. The station code is AOPR [0]. After retrieving the mseed data from the web API using curl, and installing obspy from pip, I could plot the events. This is the result: [1]. You can see two "events". One at Nov 30, 23:12 UTC, and a second, larger one at Dec 1st, 11:52 UTC. Upon closer inspection, the first event is actually multiple smaller ones, not sure if they are related to the collapse at all. The second event is clearly one discrete thing though. The image was uploaded to twitter at 11:56 UTC, so minutes within the collapse being recorded on the seismograph. You can still see the dust in the air. Pretty cool that all this data is out there, in the open, just a curl request away. [0]: https://www.fdsn.org/networks/detail/PR/ https://www.fdsn.org/networks/detail/PR/ [1]: Note on some of the screenshots I've preprocessed the data with a lowpass filter st.filter("lowpass", freq=0.1, corners=2) to make it look nicer, while in others I haven't. I'm just an interested person, not doing this on a scientific level. https://imgur.com/a/FjrbWWa https://imgur.com/a/FjrbWWa

leephillips 6y ago
Interesting! You should write this up. Your comment has more content than most Medium articles that I’ve seen.
- est31 6y ago
  Thanks! I mainly just googled together this stuff in a matter of 1-2 hours. So it was an afternoon project :). But maybe I'll write it into a nice format. It wasn't trivial because the WWW interfaces only show earthquakes but this event was likely only registered by one station and had too low magnitude to be registered by others, and was thus filtered out.
prionassembly 6y ago
Any hints on finding seismic data from elsewhere in the world? There was a small event in South America yesterday I'd love to hit with data sciency stuff.
- 6y ago

DamnInteresting 6y ago

Photo of the wreckage from above: https://twitter.com/ruperto1023/status/1333791522269978626/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ruperto1023/status/1333791522269978626/p...

minimuffins 6y ago

Sad news. Perfect symbol of the collapse of modernity into postmodernity. All that's left of massive public science and exploration projects, abandoned, deteriorating artifacts of the past.

hedora 6y ago

"I look forward to the day when the schools automatically receive the funds they need and the Pentagon holds bake sales to buy tanks." - Terry Herndon

nickff 6y ago
A lot more money is spent on education than on the military in the USA (where education is funded by three levels of government), and most other countries.
- hedora 6y ago
  US education spending is about 20-30% more than military spending, but the money is not well-allocated. Most funding is from local taxes, which vary greatly from school to school, and sometimes from year to year. https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2021USbn_22bs2#usgs302 https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2021USbn_...
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    In fairness, the military spending probably is also not well-allocated...

alexvoda 6y ago

Would it be possible in the future to build such a telescope in an impact crater like Meteor Crater, Arizona (1)? Or is the shape or geology of an impact crater unsuitable for such an instrument? (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

Tsiklon 6y ago

This makes me profoundly sad; such an iconic structure built for the betterment of all of us, allowed to decay, rot, and collapse. Even if it was past it's point of utility the structure itself was a modern icon of design. To be hyperbolic about such things, it feels like another milestone in the path to endarkenment

btbuildem 6y ago

Arecibo was in the news recently, regarding it's decommissioning and controlled dismantling [0]. Here's a more detailed account of the collapse [1]. Looks like they called it, and it just happened quicker than expected. [0]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/famed-arecibo-telescope-brink-collapse-will-be-dismantled https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/famed-arecibo-telesc... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observatory-platform-collapse-dish-puerto-rico-telescope https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observat...

dredmorbius 6y ago

Other coverage (from HN submissions): https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/arecibo-radio-telescopes-massive-instrument-platform-has-collapsed/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/arecibo-radio-telesc... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arecibo-observatory-radio-telescope-puerto-rico-collapses/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arecibo-observatory-radio-teles... https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observatory-platform-collapse-dish-puerto-rico-telescope https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observat... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/huge-loss-huge-puerto-rico-radio-telescope-arecibo-collapses-following-n1249515 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/huge-loss-huge-puerto-ri... https://twitter.com/jivevlbi/status/1333764894454374400 https://twitter.com/jivevlbi/status/1333764894454374400

dredmorbius 6y ago
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/space/arecibo-telescope-puerto-rico.html#click=https://t.co/VqFJn0ypim https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/space/arecibo-tel...

eightysixfour 6y ago

I can't separate thinking about Arecibo from thinking about the short story "The Great Silence" by Ted Chiang, which is available freely here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/ https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia... Sad to see this experiment come to an end.

supernova87a 6y ago

Someone must have set up a webcam to capture the impending failure?

tim333 6y ago

Seems to have collapsed a while ago if James Bond films are anything to go by https://youtu.be/jp9tENRDVzA?t=313 https://youtu.be/jp9tENRDVzA?t=313 Actually the Bond shot gives a good impression of how big the thing is.

carabiner 6y ago

When will this year end? Why has God forsaken us?

HideousKojima 6y ago
Or maybe the question is why we forsook him?
chr1 6y ago
In two months you'll be asking why did that year end. God was so kind to us back then.
- carabiner 6y ago
  You know this how? What is in store for us in 2021?

jdofaz 6y ago

2020 keeps on giving...

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
OK, things are starting to make sense. It's an alien attack. They created Covid to distract us enough that we wouldn't defend Arecibo. And they're driving Trump insane with their mind control rays just to increase the chaos. /s, in case anyone couldn't tell...
- hedora 6y ago
  Too soon on the mind control ray thing. The Russians are allegedly microwaving the brains of CIA agents and their families, and the intelligence community is waiting until Trump is gone to mount a response. Citation (and perhaps tin foil hat) obviously required: https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-microwave-attacks https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-micro...
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    They think that Biden is going to be more likely to allow a response? That seems... improbable.

1auralynn 6y ago

Over 15 years of the US defunding basic research is taking its toll...

cambalache 6y ago

The fact that they let it collapse so bad instead of properly decommissioning it does not look on America, or at least America's treatment of PR.

ilamont 6y ago

I just did a simple calculation of the weight of the instrument platform, listed at 900 tons. The maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is just over 500,000 pounds, or 250 tons ... so the instrument platform was the equivalent of three fully loaded 787s, plus two M1A1 tanks piled on for good measure.

dang 6y ago

Previous threads of this story: 12 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151342 21 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045573 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149346 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

dang 6y ago

We changed the URL from https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333741751069192195 https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333741751069192195 to an article with more background info, albeit mostly from Twitter. Other sources (via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Arecibo&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...): https://www.npr.org/2020/12/01/940767001/arecibo-observatory-telescope-collapses-ending-an-era-of-world-class-research https://www.npr.org/2020/12/01/940767001/arecibo-observatory... https://twitter.com/ProfAbelMendez/status/1333807156051775488 https://twitter.com/ProfAbelMendez/status/133380715605177548... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/space/arecibo-telescope-puerto-rico.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/space/arecibo-tel... https://apnews.com/article/technology-arecibo-observatory-puerto-rico-science--0da6abb251f455977bf0c752348e712e https://apnews.com/article/technology-arecibo-observatory-pu... https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observatory-platform-collapse-dish-puerto-rico-telescope https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754959/arecibo-observat...

briancp 6y ago

A shame. Beyond the loss to science, the equipment itself was impressive. A 900-ton observation platform is like a multistory building suspended a few hundred feet in the air, in the middle of the jungle. An interesting gallery of the telescope being constructed is here: https://www.naic.edu/history_gal/historicgal.html https://www.naic.edu/history_gal/historicgal.html

softwaredoug 6y ago

Related their store is still open and even had a Cyber Monday sale https://shop.areciboobservatory.org/ https://shop.areciboobservatory.org/

throwanem 6y ago
Ah, it's a good time to pick out something nice from the Fall Collection. https://shop.areciboobservatory.org/collections/ao-fall-collection https://shop.areciboobservatory.org/collections/ao-fall-coll...
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  You put the pun in punk.

Noumenon72 6y ago

They knew it was coming down for months and they couldn't set up a webcam to entertain Reddit for five seconds?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jcranmer 6y ago
Strictly speaking, it wasn't until the second cable broke about a month ago that its high risk of collapse was expected, and the engineering report itself took two weeks after the second break.

doctat 6y ago

The logical thing to do here is to simply rebuild it, right? I mean all the infrastructure is there. Power, networking, housing, staff, etc., etc. Like there couldn’t ever be a more convenient place to drop a similar type of instrument, right? And it seems that the towers are still up, surely the anchors for the cables are no worse for wear. The actual dish itself looks to be composed of a bunch of panels that are probably designed for easy replacement. And most of them seem to still be intact. Just string up a newer, lighter weight, more powerful state of the art instrument array on a newer, stronger, lighter set of cables. Or am I missing something obvious?

shadowofneptune 6y ago
There is no money for this. The National Science Foundation, the primary source of funding for Arecibo, has been trying to shut it down or offset its cost for years. NSF is a part of the US government, so it has been a victim of the cuts to public science that have affected universities and institutions across the US since the end of the Cold War and the Great Recession. You are right that it would be simple, but there was nobody willing to fund it until it was too late. That is the real tragedy here, Arecibo was killed over the course of years.
- casefields 6y ago
  >NSF victim of cuts to public science Why is this completely erroneous fact believed by so many people? Other than a 1 time injection due to the 2008 crisis, NSF funding increases nearly every year and is currently at its second highest budget ever: https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFRqstAppropHist/NSFRequestsandAppropriationsHistory.pdf https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFRqstAppropHist/NSFRequestsand...
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    Counterpoint: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2019/pdf/40b_fy2019.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2019/pdf/40b_fy2019.pdf In FY2019 NSF reduced its budget for Arecibo from $8M to $6.08M a 24% reduction in support for this instrument.

cs702 6y ago

2020. :-(

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

You did good Arecibo. Friend of an era.

dukeofdoom 6y ago

I was there 10 years ago. I have some video and photos from the observatory. Was pretty awesome place to visit. One of a kind in the wold. But even back then some of the panels looked damaged. Hard to imagine that an observatory of such scientific importance, would be neglected and allowed to rust away until cable break. Trump Created The Space Force, and bragged about how much money he gave Puerto Rico after the hurricane. Large projects like this need ongoing government funding. So I'm surprised more was not done to prevent this. Similar things happened during collapse of the USSR. Major scientific projects just got left behind to rust. I know that China built a new larger radio telescope, but this one could send out messages. The observatory helped us map planets, find pulsars, track asteroids, and send messages to aliens. Arecibo message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message#Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message#Numbers

mrtksn 6y ago
>Similar things happened during collapse of the USSR. Major scientific projects just got left behind to rust. It's fascinating to think about it. Some projects like advanced rocket engines were salvaged by people who care and other projects like the Buran shuttle were left to rot and destroyed by petty stuff like rooftop collapse. At the end though, maybe it's just a natural selection process. Arguably, saving the Buran might have turned into an expensive mistake considering the fate of US shuttle program.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  Unfortunately termination of the Buran project also led to discontinuation of the Energia rocket [0]. It was quite a marvelous rocket and could've been used without Buran in the Polyus configuration. And in the late 80s there was even a modification in development with airplane-like reusable boosters. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia
  - philistine 6y ago
    The initial impetus for the Buran was a desire to match capabilities with the US. Unfortunately, it’s not surprising that a rocket meant for such a political purpose fell to the wayside after the fall of the Soviet system.

acvny 6y ago

Decommisioning work might have been too expensive.

lightlyused 6y ago

My Spanish sucks, but here is a video from some of the Staff at the telescope. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CIQsBa2H3kg/?igshid=gkczuoe5ud4l https://www.instagram.com/tv/CIQsBa2H3kg/?igshid=gkczuoe5ud4...

robissan 6y ago

Reports from PR are saying that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had lost interest in the telescope years ago and had rendered the project obsolete. I guess time will tell.

robissan 6y ago

Apparently the National Science Foundation (NSF) lost interest in the project years ago and had rendered the observatory obsolete. I guess time will tell if this is true or not.

pryelluw 6y ago

My father drove me there on a whim when I was about 6 years old and asking about about it. We lived about an hour and a half away.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Ok can we replace it with 10,000 individuals around the world with 1 sq meter receivers? Each one providing a pixel in an enormous virtual dish?

yangvz 6y ago

China!