Arecibo radio telescope goes dark after snapped cable shreds dish

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/arecibo-radio-telescope-goes-dark-after-snapped-cable-shreds-dish

by rmason • 6 years ago

261 64 6 years ago

unsrsly• 6 years ago

This dish was in the movie Goldeneye and apparently a lot of other films as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory

umvi• 6 years ago

This dish is also the final level of the Nintendo 64 "Goldeneye" game - "Cradle"

LolWolf4• 6 years ago

It was also in Battlefield 4 ("Rogue Transmission")

breck• 6 years ago

IMO Contact being the best https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Contact.php

brianzelip• 6 years ago

The image used for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album cover, was originally created by radio astronomer Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory for his 1970 Ph.D. thesis.

supernova87a• 6 years ago

Story has been posted already 2 other times in the last 2 days?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128877

arthurcolle• 6 years ago

I didn't see it the first two times, so I'm happy it was posted again.

bookofjoe• 6 years ago

ditto

jcims• 6 years ago

According to this paper [1] each of those panels is ~3x6 feet (presumably 1x2m) and RMS surface error across the primary surface of the antenna is ~5mm

http://gancell.com/papers/CMSC%202001_Final.pdf

Natales• 6 years ago

This is sad. Puerto Rico has already been hit hard so many times. Agree or not, the observatory has a prominent place in pop culture, which helps bring the much needed visitors, and with them, awareness of Space Research and Science in general, in a time when sparking interest in STEM in the next generation is so important.

joe_the_user• 6 years ago

It's tragic. Unfortunately, it's easy to see things like this in terms of a pattern of neglected infrastructure in the US. Puerto Rico in general has been damaged and neglected to a criminal extent - this particular situation will get media attention for a bit, maybe be fixed but that's likely about it.

mturmon2• 6 years ago

In this case, it's a complex story. NSF has a collection of astronomical observatories (optical and radio).

Some of them have decades-old equipment, and keeping everything operating will eventually preclude building anything new. So, NSF has been trying to offload some older observatories to universities, or consortia of universities - Arecibo is one such.

For instance, some older solar observatories were taken offline to build DKIST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telesco...), which is an amazing instrument, just now coming online.

Of course, there is a lot of strife and anger caused by reallocation of resources like this.

toomuchtodo4• 6 years ago

Puerto Rico in general has been damaged and neglected to a criminal extent - this particular situation will get media attention for a bit, maybe be fixed but that's likely about it.

Its an issue fraught with peril. Puerto Rico has no statehood, so they're a lesser property within the US as a whole. They have very little economy besides tourism to speak of, enormous amounts of corruption through the various governmental levels, and a populace that is rapidly aging. They plugged budget wholes with debt until it reached levels requiring an independent oversight board stepping in to take over. If you're able to find work on the mainland, you bounce, and only stick around on the island if you can't.

I'm not sure what the solution is. You can't write blank checks to a broken government forever.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/puerto-rico-us-territory-cr...

TheSpiceIsLife• 6 years ago

It's okay, we don't need Aracebo.

We've got China's FAST - Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

And Russia's RATAN-600 - радиоастрономический телескоп Академии наук – 600, an acronym for the "Academy of Sciences Radio Telescope – 600

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600

a-dub• 6 years ago

I'd be curious if there were any science outreach programs for kids and adults that were made available to the people in Puerto Rico...

markus_zhang2• 6 years ago

Is it the same one in x files e2m1? Sorry I meant s2e1 ahem

knodi123• 6 years ago

Yes. Arecibo is mentioned in the episode description, and the x-files episode is mention on the Arecibo wiki page.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751154/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory

markus_zhang2• 6 years ago

Thanks! Good memory here...

HumblyTossed• 6 years ago

Pretty sad that this happened. It is rather iconic.

Interesting, though, I did not realize my Alma Mater took over management of it.

markrages• 6 years ago

For the benefit of other engineers who have not read the article:

The damage was done by a wire rope, not an electrical cable.

oasisbob• 6 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one who initially read "cable" as more likely to be electrical than structural.

JshWright4• 6 years ago

Scott Manley posted an excellent video with some discussion of this incident, as well as going over some of the major contributions Arecibo has made to science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE

bargle0• 6 years ago

The thing that’s crazy about Arecibo is that it’s not just a telescope — it’s also a very high power transmitter, so they’re doing astronomy with RADAR. I didn’t know such a thing was even possible until this week.

kzrdude• 6 years ago

Cool, so what do they target? It must be something reasonably close. Though I realize even light year reflections are possible!

acqq• 6 years ago

so what do they target?

Traditionally, Moon, Venus, asteroids.

Also:

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Radiation_astronomy/Radars#A...

"the round trip light time to objects beyond Saturn is longer than the time the telescope can track it, preventing radar observations of more distant objects."

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

"The Arecibo message is a 1974 interstellar radio message carrying basic information about humanity and Earth sent to globular star cluster M13. It was meant as a demonstration of human technological achievement, rather than a real attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials."

"The message consisted of 1,679 binary digits, approximately 210 bytes, transmitted at a frequency of 2,380 MHz and modulated by shifting the frequency by 10 Hz, with a power of 450 kW. The "ones" and "zeros" were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes."

rimliu• 6 years ago

Solar system: https://www.naic.edu/ao/scientist-user-portal/planetary-scie...

api• 6 years ago

Just in time for the thing for which Oumuamua was a spent deceleration stage... :)

lambdatronics• 6 years ago

Came here to make alien attack joke.

WarOnPrivacy• 6 years ago

These are the first pics of the underside I've ever seen. I'd like to see more of the infrastructure.

dylan6043• 6 years ago

Watch the movie Contact. There's an entire scene underneath the dome.

also: http://www.mreclipse.com/Observatory/Arecibo/full/Arecibo03-...

JshWright4• 6 years ago

Tom Scott did a video about Arecibo and posted a "behind the scenes" video on his second channel that covers a lot of interesting spaces in and around the telescope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZAWqk-wrzc

thelittleone• 6 years ago

Wow the extent of the damage is surprising. Seems like a pretty big design oversight. If one broken cable can cause such damage, there should be redundancy built in. One extra cable. "One is none, two is one". From the luxury of my hindsight chair.

dylan6043• 6 years ago

A 3" cable of this type is not an insignificant thing. Have you ever seen the cables used to support telephone poles? Those are maybe 3/8" (working from memory). If you are a teenager running in the dark at full speed at night while attempting to evade being caught papering a friends house and catch one of these cables across your neck, you're going to have a very bad night. I've seen the results.

The damage isn't from something failing because there was no other support after this cable failed. It was this failing cable falling back to the ground that did the damage. If it were an object like a rock, it would just drop straight-ish down to make a hole where it impacts. This is a cable that would make that initial impact hole, but would continue to do damage as it was pulled into its final resting spot.

coolgeek• 6 years ago

Oof... I caught one of those phone pole cables on the forehead running in the dark one night, and I caught the guy wire of a soccer net/goal under the chin one day during practice. Both very unpleasant experiences

a5withtrrs• 6 years ago

There is actually quite a bit of redundancy in place, there are several cables which all still hold the larger instrumentation cluster in place above the dish and are able to tolerate a failure like the one that occurred.

learnstats2• 6 years ago

This comment suggests that you did not read the article. I will quote some of the key points that you may have missed:

1. "The cable that broke this week was not one of the main support cables but one of several auxiliary ones"

2. "Because it contained a lot of stored energy from tension, it flailed around wildly, damaging the Gregorian dome and the main reflector of the dish"

3. "Typically, such cables don’t fail in that way"

JshWright4• 6 years ago

From your comment, I think your underrstanding is that the cable failed and the section of the dish it was supporting failed due to lack of support.

That's not the case... The cable failed, and then the giant cable (with a ton of stored energy due to tension) impacted the dish (as well as some other bits of the antenna).

mastazi• 6 years ago

some steering is possible by moving the receivers, or antennas, around a platform suspended by cables high above the dish. The cable that broke this week was not one of the main support cables but one of several auxiliary ones added in the 1990s to stabilize the platform when a large new antenna, known as the Gregorian dome, was added.

If anyone is curious, in this article there is a picture where you can see the suspended platform with the "Gregorian dome":

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/12/901920638/puerto-ricos-arecib...

rmason• 6 years ago

I've always been fascinated by the Arecibo Observatory. There was a ham radio operator who was an early employee there. I met him at the Dayton Ham convention in the early seventies.

I planned a trip to Puerto Rico around ten years later. Unfortunately I suffered bad food poisoning on Guadeloupe and by the time I got to San Juan I was so ill that I had to cut out the trip to Arecibo. Still want to see it someday.

liv-io• 6 years ago

Arecibo? Makes me want to listen to Carbon Based Lifeforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifiICunJ-ZA

waheoo• 6 years ago

Typically, such cables don’t fail in that way, which is “concerning,” he says.

Definitely aliens covering their tracks.

unixhero• 6 years ago

Is it over for Arecibo then?

ChaseT• 6 years ago

What a shame, especially that the dome reflector was damaged too. I remember visiting in person and being awestruck by the sheer size and engineering skill needed to make this. Plus it provides needed tourism revenue for PR; I hope it's not abandoned.

Arecibo radio telescope goes dark after snapped cable shreds dish

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