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The Collapse of Puerto Rico’s Iconic Telescope
- alfl 6y agoThe collapse of Arecibo made me sad, like our space infra is in decay. Space X is a bright light and, I hope, represents a change in direction towards positive growth.
- mturmon 6y agoThese two questions (Arecibo and SpaceX) are orthogonal. Arecibo is ground-based science. SpaceX is access to Earth orbit, not really anything to do with science or research. NSF is an agency promoting research. It is continually handing old telescopes over to university consortia, and building the next generation of hardware. In this case, the handoff was bungled. A lot of technical debt had piled up. But it turns out to be really hard to get people to pay for upgrades and maintenance. For more on the technical story of this collapse, see: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/how-famed-arecibo-telescope-fell-and-how-it-might-rise-again https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/how-famed-arecibo-te...
- simplicio 6y agoYea, Arecibo aside, we're entering something of a golden age of ground-based observatories, so disagree we're in decay when it comes to such devices.
- jonplackett 6y agoWould Starship allow for a much bigger telescope to be put in orbit?
- Out_of_Characte 6y agoNot really, Perseverance didn't even use spaceX. total cost is the limiting factor like it almost always is. Extremely large fairings are only needed when you need a complex piece up in a single piece.
- jonplackett 6y agoThanks. I imagined that for a really big telescope then a really big faring would be useful for that exact reason. Why isn’t that the case? Wouldn’t starship at least make it a lot cheaper to put a really big telescope in orbit?
- VectorLock 6y agoIs Space X a brighter light than NASA landing a freakin' helicopter on Mars?
- wizzwizz4 6y agoYes; SpaceX is setting up Starlink, which is much brighter at night than any Mars mission.
- maccam94 6y agoPerseverance was ~1 ton of mass at launch, and cost ~$2.2B (plus $243M for the Atlas V rocket). SpaceX's Starship aims to deliver up to 100 tons of payload to Mars for ~tens of millions of dollars. Imagine how much science equipment that could be.
- aurizon 6y agoThe tragedy of the inert beurocracy. The decline of the physical supports of this radio telescope was known for years. Maintenance was neglected for years, a well paid beurocracy used up all available funds. All well documented. They needed to allocate funds to maintain that cannot be used to swell bureaocrat's pockets - Puerto Rico is well known for this. It is possible that funders became exhausted at this political game that they starved it of funds intentionally - intending to direct funds to mm arrays and other new projects where there is less political cronyism. Now it is dead - how big is the budget now?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoLift observatories to space, beyond the clutches of inept bureaucracies and natural decay from on-planet neglect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes
- aurizon 6y agoYes, this is the trend. With lower cost of launches, I would like to see more remote observatories at the stable lagrange points where they are immune from most man made interference and the inherent stability does not burn consumables to any degree - one assumes solar will suffice for energy.
- paulmd 6y agoThat solves nothing, without maintenance space-based telescopes will run out of consumables (cryogenics to cool the sensors, etc) or their orbits will eventually decay, or they will eventually need hands-on maintenance. Nothing lasts forever, even in space.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoHubble has been operational for about 30 years. An observatory needs to last only for its expected lifetime, until its successor arrives in orbit. One would expect to be lifting newer, improved platforms to orbit on a brisk cadence as the cost of launch continues to decline.
- exabrial 6y agoFor as amazing as this instrument was for it's time, it came with _a lot_ of limitations. I was sad to see it's demise, but the technology has been superseded.
- jandrese 6y agoFrom what I understand this is not the case. There is no replacement for some of the work this telescope could do, mostly around the ability to also act as a giant RADAR with its powerful transmitters.
- exabrial 6y agoRadar is not very useful if it can't be pointed at something
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoSource needed. > The Arecibo telescope had been upgraded regularly, with several new instruments slated for installation in the coming years. “The telescope is in no way obsolete,” says Christopher Salter, an astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory, who worked at Arecibo for years.
- technosmurf 6y agoWhere did you get the idea that the technology's been superseded? The NANOGrav collaboration is trying to use millisecond pulsars to determine if a galaxy-wide analysis of 47 pulsars can detect gravitational waves. The team says that Arecibo was instrumental for their data analysis because the telescope was unique in its radio sensitivity: "Although NANOGrav does not expect the situation to result in significant delays in detection due to years of very sensitive Arecibo data already contributing to their datasets, the loss of Arecibo is a terrible blow to science, and will impact NANOGrav’s ability to characterize the background and detect individual sources in the future." http://nanograv.org/press/2021/01/11/12-Year-GW-Background.html http://nanograv.org/press/2021/01/11/12-Year-GW-Background.h...
- cbkeller 6y agoWhile the underfunding and collapse of the observatory is a tragedy, I think it is perhaps less surprising in the context that much of the original political will behind the observatory was motivated by potential military applications, which became somewhat passé after the fall of the Soviet Union. This "dual use" origin is mentioned briefly in the article here, but expanded in more length in some other sources [1,2]: The origins of the observatory trace to late 1950s efforts to develop anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defenses as part of the newly formed United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ABM umbrella-effort, Project Defender. [...] It was known that hot, high-speed objects caused ionization of the atmosphere that reflects radar waves, and it appeared that a warhead's signature would be different enough from decoys that a detector could pick out the warhead directly, or alternately, provide added information that would allow operators to focus a conventional tracking radar on the single return from the warhead. Although the concept appeared to offer a solution to the tracking problem, there was almost no information on either the physics of re-entry or a strong understanding of the normal composition of the upper layers of the ionosphere. ARPA began to address both simultaneously. To better understand the radar returns from a warhead, several radars were built on Kwajalein Atoll, while Arecibo started with the dual purpose of understanding the ionosphere's F-layer while also producing a general-purpose scientific radio observatory. Some folks here may also be familiar with the US project to locate Soviet radar installations via signals reflected off the moon (as discussed in Steve Blank's excellent Secret history of Silicon Valley [3]), and it seems that Arecibo participated in this as well [4]: The CIA employed a 150-foot dish antenna at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California to monitor Soviet radar signals reflected off the moon, while the National Security Agency used the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in Puerto Rico to intercept signals that had originally been transmitted from a Soviet Arctic Coast radar. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Telescope#Design_and_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Telescope#Design_and_c... [2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37898/collapsed-arecibo-radio-telescope-was-first-built-for-ballistic-missile-defense-research https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37898/collapsed-arecib... [3] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ [4] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB479/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB479/
- teleforce 6y agoWe have an old big solar bowl facility that has not been used for years (read abandoned) that we want to repurpose into a radio telescope. Anyone can recommend a potential grant or fund that is available to fund the effort? Flash news, China is opening observations applications for the world's largest radio telescope (FAST) for scientists outside China starting this March 31 [1]. [1]https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-30/China-s-FAST-telescope-to-open-to-global-scientists-from-March-31--Z3vXS6tCqA/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-30/China-s-FAST-telescope...
- anonu 6y agoArecibo is part of a bigger story of the Puerto Rican decline: basically a US state with no voting rights and no chance of getting more equity. A vestige of American colonialism.
- Alupis 6y agoThey vote on becoming a state with pretty frequent regularity. All have failed[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Puerto_Rican_status_referendum#:~:text=Puerto%20Rico%20has%20had%20five,had%20only%20a%2023%25%20turnout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Puerto_Rican_status_refer....
- anonu 6y agoThe 2020 referendum - less than 6 months ago - was pretty clearly aligned with statehood [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Puerto_Rican_status_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Puerto_Rican_status_refer...
- Alupis 6y agoArticle points out that referendum had less than a 25% turnout.
- anonu 6y agoThat was 2017 - 2020 had more than 50%
- throw_away 6y agoThe last 3 out of 6 total (every one since 2012) have had > 50% of the votes for statehood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico_political_status_plebiscites#Table_summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico_political_status_p.... A fourth, in 1998, lost by only a couple percentage points to a 'none of the above' option.
- rkagerer 6y agoAmong the ruins ... two seven-foot klystrons — specialized vacuum tubes that amplify radio frequencies — that had somehow survived the crash nearly intact. They had been installed shortly before the first cable broke and had never been used. Neat example of where vacuum tubes are (were) still in use!
- emptybits 6y ago"The Arecibo Planetary Radar used two klystrons that provided a total power output of 1 MW (continuous) at 2380 MHz."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klystron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klystron
- myself248 6y agoKlystrons also power LINACs and probably other types of particle accelerators, too. You'll also see large vacuum tubes in industrial RF heaters, typically operating at 13.56MHz, which is a "garbage" frequency set aside for such uses.
- snypher 6y agoI found this pretty interesting, there's a few classic frequencies in this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_radio_band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_radio_band
- kweks 6y agoIt's also specifically the frequency of the a majority of RFID / NFC cards.
- myself248 6y agoThat's why -- it's a band that's by definition insensitive to noise, so nobody cares if there are a thousand industrial furnaces and a billion RFID readers screeching into it.
- gameswithgo 6y agoAre there any plans to build a new, better telescope in the same location? Can we get that happening?
- sbierwagen 6y agoPuerto Rico is pretty vulnerable to hurricanes, which are only going to get worse going forward. And if they do eventually win a referendum on independence, then the facility would suddenly be on foreign soil.
- CameronNemo 6y agoUS territories can really just leave like that?
- technothrasher 6y agoConsidering independence has never received more than 5% of the vote in any referendum held there, I don't think that's a question that will be answered one way or the other by Puerto Rico any time soon.
- adolfojp 6y agoIndependence by subterfuge has a very high chance of succeeding in Puerto Rico. The status quo party was taken over by independence politicians (soberanistas) and they're restructuring the party as a Compact of Free Association party. The Compact of Free Association is an agreement that the US made with former US territories that gained their independence like Palau and the Marshall Islands. Several US based politicians strongly support that change so they're also pushing for it. But why is it subterfuge? The official name of Puerto Rico is Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico in Spanish and Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in English. The English name is not a translation of the Spanish name. A correct translation would be Free Associated State of Puerto Rico. Coincidentally the independent countries under the Compact of Free Association are called Free Associated States. The soberanistas are calling the new status definition Libre Asociación. Their goal is to convince people that Libre Asociación is not a form of independence but an enhanced Estado Libre Asociado. The independence political party has stated that they would also support this new status definition. If the soberanistas succeed in getting the Estado Libre Asociado voters to vote for Libre Asociación in a binding referendum they'll make Puerto Rico an independent country.
- tomcooks 6y agoThe encoded Arecibo message to space was one of the earliest memories I have of science being amazing. I wonder if that project will continue on another facility
- gautamcgoel 6y agoOne of my astro profs from undergrad (John Wise) got married at Arecibo. I saw a pic online of him in a suit standing next to his wife in a wedding gown with the dish behind them... It's hard to articulate what that telescope really meant to people.
- citizenpaul 6y agoThis is what societal collapse looks like. The NSF budget was $10 million a year for the telescope and kept getting cut. Basically pocket change for the US Gov. There was more than $10 million tax dollars wasted on woke BS TODAY. All that the woke money is doing is going into the pockets of various cronies.
- AlexandrB 6y agoForget woke BS. How much was wasted on the "forever war" in Iraq and the F35 program over the last 20 years?
- oetnxkdrlgcexu 6y agoTurns out, the woke are corpo authoritarians, and the forever war and mil-ind-com are also policies of the woke.