Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/famed-arecibo-telescope-brink-collapse-will-be-dismantled

by LUmBULtERA • 6 years ago

830 295 6 years ago

This is horrible. Arecibo is still crucial in radio astronomy experiments ongoing as of 2019. It should be repaired, until a replacement is built.

protoster• 6 years ago

As the article explains, it has been deemed to be unsafe to repair. What's probably missing in that sentence is "...within an acceptable budget."

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

Not sure... even with an infinite budget, you need time to build your repair solutions. It's possible that for no amount of money can you repair it before it suffers complete collapse without doing risky things that may cause loss of life.

zaroth2• 6 years ago

Speaking with absolutely no expertise in the matter, I would guess it’s on the verge of collapse due to lack of maintenance or fatal design flaw. It’s probably no longer a matter of fixing more like a total rebuild would be required?

tootie• 6 years ago

The article also says the NSF has been looking to divest since 2006 in favor of other projects and had a signed agreement to transfer operations to UCF. It's not simply a matter of whether or not it's still useful, but whether it's worth the cost relative to other facilities.

LUmBULtERA• 6 years ago

I loved seeing Arecibo when I last visited PR. It is sad to see it dismantled -- I wonder what plans, if any, there are to replace its capabilities.

topspin• 6 years ago

FAST is now online, newer and larger.

lobotryas• 6 years ago

Whose money are you volunteering to be spent on that?

deeeeplearning2• 6 years ago

I'm sure you could trade a handful of Patriot missiles and one or two F-35's to fund it several times over.

xondono2• 6 years ago

I don’t get the flagging, it’s a very valid question.

I’m sure the people at PR would rather see the money invested on infrastructure with higher impact on their citizens life.

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

Yeah, in the previous story I mentioned[1] NANOGrav, which is on the brink of some really interesting science but relies heavily on Arecibo for their dataset.

They mention a delay of more than a few months of data from Arecibo would have very negative consequences, so an outright loss must be a very, very significant blow for them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046378

dekhn• 6 years ago

As soon as I heard a second cable had broken, I knew they would shut it down.

beamatronic• 6 years ago

Is the same money (replacement cost) better spent on a space-based solution?

topbanana• 6 years ago

it wouldn't be the same money

Metacelsus• 6 years ago

I don't think atmospheric absorption/scattering is as much of an issue for radio telescopes as it is for other kinds.

jcims• 6 years ago

Ionosphere eats/reflects mostly everything below 10Mhz

geuis• 6 years ago

Not really in this case. It’s much cheaper to build a larger and more capable installation on the ground.

sp332• 6 years ago

A space-based solution won't get you such a large dish. And that means you can't get effective 20 terawatts of output power for active radar across the solar system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#General_in...

PopePompus2• 6 years ago

Nothing remotely similar to this has ever been built in space. This telescope is one of the very few which transmits radio waves as well as receiving them. The transmitters are used for radar mapping of solar system objects, as well as ionospheric research. Reproducing this instrument in space would probably cost as much as the ISS. It would be a Large Hadron Collider class investment.

kitd2• 6 years ago

The transmitters are also used for near-Earth asteroid detection. One would hope that capability isn't being abandoned.

Sharlin• 6 years ago

This sort of a telescope structure fundamentally depends on gravity to naturally pull it into the required paraboloid shape. There's absolutely no way you could do anything remotely similar in space with current or near-future technology. And even if you could, that money would buy you dozens or hundreds of Earthbound Arecibos.

Rebelgecko2• 6 years ago

The same money they spent to build it would barely cover the cost of a launch, let alone an actual instrument

IronRanger• 6 years ago

Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?

caeril• 6 years ago

Our intellectual capability is not degraded; rather, it's funneled into adtech, porn, social media click optimization, and entertainment. Critical distinction.

pmiller22• 6 years ago

Ah, yes, all those smart people making a Brave New World, while that world literally burns is totally not the same as degrading our intellectual capacity.

WalterSear• 6 years ago

Sounds like degradation to me.

marcinzm2• 6 years ago

Nothing lasts forever and things require ever more upkeep costs as they get older.

kitd2• 6 years ago

Tbf China has one that's half a kilometer wide, so there's still hope for progress :)

http://www.hexapolis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Worlds-L...

mlindner• 6 years ago

The China one doesn't have the ability to transmit, only receive.

gamegod• 6 years ago

No, it's a reflection of the state of US infrastructure.

Stubb• 6 years ago

Which is also a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century. Certainly the ability to focus it toward advancing the understanding of the natural world.

jlmorton• 6 years ago

It's a reflection of the damage caused by a Category 5 hurricane, and subsequent tropical storm.

bsg75• 6 years ago

It’s yet another symbol that we waste resources. Military and pork spending far outweigh the costs of things that could instead improve out quality of life (health) and the understanding of our universe.

xadhominemx2• 6 years ago

It’s outdated technology. We are still spending hundreds of billions on basic science, including space science.

xadhominemx2• 6 years ago

Not really since the installation has been mostly a tourist destination for years. This happens to be a piece of scientific infrastructure that a lot of people recognize from movies, video games, etc but it’s not actually very important.

mhh__• 6 years ago

No.

You'd have to be very blinkered about progress elsewhere to think that, notice how there are multiple apparently good covid vaccines already?

ardy426• 6 years ago

Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?

No, it's a symbol of the degradation of US political capability in the 21st century.

To be more explicit: why build a telescope like this if you axiomatically believe the free market will do everything worth doing and that the government projects are waste by definition? There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant, and that's when the US built many of its nice things that we still celebrate today.

mschuster91• 6 years ago

It turns out the free market is extremely good at innovation, but horrible for maintenance or long lived projects - as soon as something is not deemed "profitable" any more, it gets shut down. No matter how useful it is for literally millions of people (Google Reader comes to a mind).

ars• 6 years ago

As someone else wrote in this thread, US funding of these types of projects has gone up not down.

This is simply a decision on which kind of projects to fund not a reduction in science as a whole.

throwaway0a5e2• 6 years ago

There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant,

That was also a time when three news networks controlled everything on TV. Print media had "journalistic integrity" (i.e. was buddy-buddy with existing institutions) so you never got to hear about it when the police kicked in a black guy's skull for no reason or when a construction project turned into a boondoggle handout for someone well connected. It was also a time with less government. People didn't have to put up with (as much) bureaucratic run around in order to build a deck on their house or to open a business.

The reason there's no faith in government these days is because there's people telling us how that sausage is made and we eat so much of it we're sick of it.

trboyden• 6 years ago

Yet government space travel is dead, and private space travel (SpaceX) is booming. So there's that. Just because it doesn't happen on your timeline doesn't mean private is inferior to government. It means private is waiting for it to be financially feasible. Which if the government did things that way, we wouldn't be $136 trillion dollars in debt.

fennecfoxen2• 6 years ago

The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national political leadership class identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today.

For reference, the nation's leadership in the 1950s included the likes of Senator McCarthy, and his famous hearings ran through about 1954. Have you heard of the "Red Scare"? No, Arecibo is the brainchild of the Cold War military-industrial complex, originally meant to help steer anti-ballistic missiles (as part of the DEFENDER program), and we should not shed too many tears that those days are over.

tibbydudeza• 6 years ago

China built a bigger one called FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) at a cost of 1.2 billion USD.

The political leaders of the CCP are all trained engineers and it helps not having to explain your actions to fickle voters.

coliveira2• 6 years ago

No, we already have the FAST telescope. It is more a degradation of US infrastructure.

pfdietz• 6 years ago

No, nor is it a pigeon.

JohnJamesRambo• 6 years ago

I remember as a child some kids' show taking us down to the dish as we cruise around and under the huge thing in the jungle. Thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. I can't believe this legend is all going to be discarded.

overkill28• 6 years ago

Reading Rainbow? That's where I first learned about it. You can see the clip here: https://youtu.be/Fl32aV3RcpE?t=1176

myself2482• 6 years ago

Fuuuuuuuck.

I understand the decision to dismantle the failing structure which is currently unsafe and tricky to repair.

But might a new one be built in its place? How can we push for that?

Darmody2• 6 years ago

Or maybe use all that money to build a good one on the Moon.

PopePompus2• 6 years ago

all of that money, plus a thousand times more.

Rebelgecko2• 6 years ago

They've seriously struggled to find a few million per year just to keep the thing running and do the bare minimum of maintenance (or perhaps less than the bare minimum). I think they'd be hard pressed to scrounge up the billions of dollars they'd need to put a new one on the moon

dfsegoat• 6 years ago

It would seem unlikely in PR given the state of infrastructure there.

The hurricane destroyed a lot of the already failing power and port infrastructure, for instance.

https://www.rollcall.com/2019/11/12/report-puerto-ricos-infr...

HarryHirsch3• 6 years ago

Back in the 1950s the US Government built a lot of space infrastructure in the South (Stennis, Redstone &c) to develop the backwards corners of the nation. There's no political will for that any longer, it seems.

abnercoimbre• 6 years ago

Puertorican here who grew up visiting the Observatory!! Became a NASA engineer (at KSC.) It was the dish that made a huge impact on me.

The answer is to invest in rebuilding this, or else puertoricans will continue to lose local sources of inspiration. That's a loss for America.

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

I mean, it's location is still surely ideal. But it's clear the construction that's there isn't safe. I wonder if, provided they're able to dismantle the remaining facility without complete collapse, if it'd be reasonable to "rebuild" on the same site.

It sounds like the towers should be rebuilt, all of the cables replaced, etc. And obviously the dish at minimum needs repair. I can't imagine anything would be salvageable from a complete collapse, but if they can bring down the observatory safely, it might not be crazy to think they could erect a new one over the dish at a later date.

tomatotomato37• 6 years ago

Is it an ideal location though? From an astrophysics perspective I bet it's ideal, but from a structural perspective it's still a large steel structure in the tropics that's also simultaneously in both a hurricane and earthquake zone, which to me seems closer to a worst case scenario than a perfect spot to build.

Ignoring geopolitical matters I wonder if an installation on the same latitude in the mexican mountains would be better spot to build such a thing.

vultour• 6 years ago

By paying for it? It has been struggling with financing for a long time.

avmich• 6 years ago

What kind of money to make it running we're talking about? Articles don't seem to directly specify the number.

URfejk• 6 years ago

Give your own money and/or find someone that will invest in the project.

dylan6042• 6 years ago

Anybody got the number to SR Hadden?

pndy• 6 years ago

China has similar construction called FAST/Tianyan [1], while Russia runs RATAN-600 [2] since 70s but it differs much from Arcibo and FAST in term of construction.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600

stjohnswarts3• 6 years ago

With half the country against public education and science literacy in general, I don't have much hope for a replacement at this point.

gk1• 6 years ago

Shoot. I had the chance to see it this year but decided to drive past instead. (It is somewhat off the main road that surrounds Puerto Rico.) Granted, most of the island was still without electricity because of the M6.4 earthquake that shook the island two days before, and I had other priorities at the time (eg, tsunamis, survival)...

rovr1384• 6 years ago

The one in January? It was probably closed. The earthquakes did some damage.

Glad to hear you at least where able to explore other areas of the island and not just San Juan and metro areas.

briandilley• 6 years ago

What a great BF4 map.

poisonarena• 6 years ago

I actually always thought it was abandoned since 1994, based on the first episode of the X-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Men_(The_X-Files)

leptons2• 6 years ago

That's what happens when teevee is your source of truth.

mattr47• 6 years ago

I just watch the movie Contact this past weekend. Love that telescope and the movie.

rvense• 6 years ago

I watch that at least once a year with my wife. It'll feel strange from now on. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself... and for that we need telescopes!

osullivj• 6 years ago

Wonderful movie - one of my all time faves. It's based on Carl Sagan's book of the same name, which is also excellent.

kgin• 6 years ago

When I was 5 years old, I saw a pbs documentary about the Arecibo telescope. During a shot of a huge expanse of the telescope's metal, the narrator said something to the effect of "as one gets closer to the equator the sun's rays are stronger and the metal becomes too hot to touch". This, combined with the fact that I had a globe with a raised ridge around the equator, caused me to assume (for many years) that the equator was literally a metal ring that encircled the entire earth.

mncharity2• 6 years ago

That's delightful. The ecology of science education misconceptions is a wild and wonderful thing. My best laugh of yesterday was this page[1] from the Stanford Solar Center, saying "It is a common misconception that the Sun is yellow, or orange or even red."... now look the page header, and at the rest of the site. Gee, I wonder where students, including astronomy graduate students, might come by such misconceptions??? :) Literal lol. And yet, that's still doing better than many a colorful NASA and solar observatory outreach site, that don't even manage that sentence.

I wonder, if a simple CSS radial gradient was available, to easily create a realistic image of the Sun, might people (someone; anyone) use that instead of the usual yellow circles and assorted misleading colorfulness? Something like [2], but for its suboptimal choice of white point (so whiter in the center), and maybe the rim edge isn't quite right. Perhaps homeschoolers might pick it up if it was posted... somewhere?

[1] http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/SunDetermine... [2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16622/need-help-si...

Nition• 6 years ago

I've noticed there seems to be a constant war over the main image on the Wikipedia page about the Sun.

In 2013 there's no image[1]. In 2014 the Sun is yellow-orange[2]. In 2015 it's white[3]. In 2016 it's briefly orange again[4] before going back to white. At one point it's sort of eye-of-sauron[5]. Finally today there are two images, one white and one yellow-orange. Further down the page it's blue.[6]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=5554532...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6246911...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6882191...

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=7042375...

[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sun&oldid=6468369...

[6]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

Stratoscope• 6 years ago

That's a neat story! Here's mine from when I was about that same age.

Grownups knew I was interested in science and physics. Sometimes they would ask me to explain what E = mc² means, and I had a ready answer:

"When you accelerate matter to the speed of light squared, it turns into energy!"

headcanon• 6 years ago

I've got a similar anecdote from when I was around the same age. When I first heard about the American Civil War and the idea of the South seceding from the union, I had just seen this cartoon [1] and thought that they literally took a saw through the Mason-Dixon line to physically separate the regions, and the South would just float away.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98&ab_channel=fukTr...

selimthegrim2• 6 years ago

I just remember its appearance in “The Arrival” as “el radio”

selimthegrim2• 6 years ago

My bad, I must have remembered this line from Contact because The Arrival is set in Owens Valley

MattGrommes• 6 years ago

This is the kind of thing I always hope that one of the billionaire nerds will help with. Seems right up Elon Musk's alley.

pmiller22• 6 years ago

Right, because that worked out so well for Notre Dame last year, eh?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/ruins-...

HarryHirsch3• 6 years ago

This is multigenerational national infrastructure. Imagine a volatile nerd like Musk funding Goldstone or CERN. He'll get into a pissing match with someone who knows what he is talking about damn quick (remember the Thai U-boat story) and then refuse to pay further.

mikepurvis2• 6 years ago

Absolutely. If anything, this is the kind of thing which absolutely justifies having a nice, stable, bipartisan revenue stream directly from the tax base (along with, you know, stuff like transportation infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc). These shouldn't be the kinds of things which have to go begging for scraps from the tables of billionaires.

CamperBob24• 6 years ago

He'll get into a pissing match with someone who knows what he is talking about damn quick

You're being grossly uncharitable considering what he's already been able to accomplish at SpaceX. The thing about Musk is that when even 5% of his hype comes to fruition, substantial positive change follows. Can you say the same about your employer, or about yourself?

Yes, in many respects he behaves like a stereotypical rich eccentric whackjob, somebody who will probably end up in Howard Hughes's old hotel suite surrounded by bottles of his own urine. It sucks that any defense of Musk inevitably has to be framed with a disclaimer like that. But like Hughes, he gets important shit done when nobody else is even willing to try, and he isn't afraid to place long bets on long shots.

perilunar• 6 years ago

SpaceX was founded 18 years ago, so it's almost a 'generation' old already. Not bad for a 'volatile nerd'. I'm betting it will be around longer than the Arecibo Observatory (the main telescope anyway).

ProAm• 6 years ago

I need less Elon Musk in my life tbh.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

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

snypher• 6 years ago

Maybe the state could take some of their spare money...

aylmao5• 6 years ago

Seems right up Elon Musk's alley.

Eh, does it? I've never heard of Elon Musk being interested in space science, only space business. An observatory doesn't make shareholders any money.

wins32767• 6 years ago

For England James?

optimalsolver• 6 years ago

No, for me.

tempodox• 6 years ago

This is truly sad news. How did it come to this? Was proper upkeep and maintenance over the years deemed too expensive? After all, everything decays over time when left alone.

criddell• 6 years ago

The article suggests it was a combination of hurricanes and earthquakes that led to critical damage.

Maybe a good car analogy would be if somebody ran a red light and smashed into your car. You may have been a bit behind on your car maintenance, but it was the crash that destroyed your car.

jonahss• 6 years ago

Anyone notice how the article's last two paragraphs are repeated

xianhn• 6 years ago

Sad day. I worked in radio astronomy and stayed on site for a week a few years back. Amazing telescope, the scale of it has to be seen to be believed. They have had serious funding issues for some time now, so now that it needs repair, I figured they might retire it. Unfortunate for all the staff that work there, it employed quite a few people. RIP Arecibo.

VerDeTerre• 6 years ago

I would not have guessed the scale. The article says the instrument platform weighs 900 tons, which is amazing to imagine. At first, I wondered if they could use a helicopter to bring it down safely, but it's like two or three 747s on a tight rope.

esoterae• 6 years ago

How about giant airbag and mating structures underneath the gondola, shaped-charge the cables, and then just let the air out to bring it down to the ground.

Just inflating something like that would take some weight off the cables and allow a more controlled and safer process.

Aeolun2• 6 years ago

The platform itself looks bigger than the instruments, so maybe it’s mostly platform?

dylan6042• 6 years ago

RIP El Radar

unreal37• 6 years ago

The Arecibo Observatory is not closing. They're only dismantling that structure. They can continue to conduct science there.

fennecfoxen2• 6 years ago

The structure holds the instruments through which they conduct science.

Apofis• 6 years ago

This sucks. So instead of attempting to fix it, they're staying on the safe side and just demolishing it instead? Full cable replacement is out of the question due to safety? That doesn't make any sense either. This is clearly a budget issue that seems to have been made by bureaucrats.

boardwaalk• 6 years ago

I loved seeing this thing when I visited PR, before the hurricane and all the rest. This makes me very sad :_(.

I wonder how they could have built it to be longer-lived/more maintainable. Did they not put enough thought into cable replacement when putting a bunch of add’l load onto it? Perhaps working without enough margin?

Also, it might not be intensely obvious from pictures, but this thing is in the middle of rainforest. Very humid. So it’s not all surprising it would degrade quickly.

Anyways, I wonder what they’ll do with that whole space. There’s a whole visitor center and school kids coming and going every day (well, maybe not this year).

rovr1384• 6 years ago

So it’s not all surprising it would degrade quickly.

Not surprising and easy to work into maintenance costs.

The problem, like with many things on the island, is actually doing the maintenance.

floatrock• 6 years ago

The thing was iconic... even if not everyone watching/playing Goldeneye knew it was a real radio telescope, it was nevertheless one of those science megaprojects that featured prominently in the popular zeitgeist and got more than one young kid excited about what's out there in the stars.

But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore?

Hoping a radio astronomer can chime in here. For example, I know out in New Mexico they have a distributed array of dishes (literally called the "Very Large Array", oh scientific creativity [0]) where, my understanding is, a bunch of computers stitch together all the individual signals and effectively get a resolution better than any single dish can. Is a design like that now state of the art, or does a monolithic design like Arecibo still give capabilities unique to single large dishes?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array

beambot• 6 years ago

What comes next: Hopefully lunar-based optical & radio telescopes!

ardy426• 6 years ago

But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore?

China already built one: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-china-world-largest-radio-tele....

Given that it's nonmilitary US government infrastructure, I doubt it will be replaced. After all, why spend money on a telescope when the government can cut the budget to lower taxes a little bit more?

adamc• 6 years ago

Makes me sad.

Tuna-Fish• 6 years ago

It wasn't nonmilitary, it's military use has just come to an end.

In a small sidenote of an absolutely magnificent lecture by Steve Blank, the Secret History of Silicon Valley [0], he notes that the reason the radio telescopes were built in the 60's was because the Soviets were using air defense radars in their interiors that were hard to get information on using other methods that were available, but a few times a month a very sensitive radio telescope would get a very good view of their emissions as they bounced off the moon.

This was the cause of the massive radio astronomy boom during the 60's that built all the western radio telescope megaprojects that have produced so much great scientific data.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo (radio telescope talk at 50m30s or so)

xyzzyz2• 6 years ago

After all, why spend money on a telescope when the government can cut the budget to lower taxes a little bit more?

The NSF budget had been steadily growing in real terms, and is now over 3 times larger than in early 80s (8 times in nominal terms). If Arecibo has not been getting enough money to maintain it, and if there is no plan for new telescope in its budget, it’s not because of “budget cuts”, but rather because of spending decisions.

I do believe that we are getting less than we used to for the spend, but it’s clear that it’s not budget cuts that are responsible: rather, it’s the productivity of science is falling, and so is efficiency of the government, despite growing expenditures.

javert2• 6 years ago

The government does not cut the budget. It is ever-growing.

Republicans lower taxes sometimes.

They re-allocate budget from one thing to another.

They don't cut the budget.

Aeolun2• 6 years ago

It seems like we should be able to build these things in space.

libraryofbabel• 6 years ago

Not a radio astronomer (hoping one chimes in), but my understanding is that it’s about sensitivity (what’s the faintest signal it can detect) and resolution (distinguishing signals from points close together in the sky). The Very Large Array has “the resolution of an antenna 36 km (22 miles) across, with the equivalent sensitivity of a dish 130 meters (422 feet) in diameter”[0], i.e. amazing resolution but sensitivity much smaller than the current largest single dish, which is China’s FAST (500 meters in diameter).

[0] http://www.vla.nrao.edu/

aylmao5• 6 years ago

But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run.

Infrastructure can also be maintained and last longer than this, which is why I'm personally sad. Had Arecibo always had the ~60 year timeline, it would've been a bittersweet retirement, like Voyager. In this case I just feel like it's gone before it should. Arecibo has been receiving reduced funding since the early 2000s [1].

The end of an era, although thankfully not of science mega-projects. There's still plenty of cool ones operating or under construction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory#Funding_co...

Retric2• 6 years ago

It really depends on the structure. Giant steel objects are much harder to keep intact, to the point where non iconic objects are easier to replace once than maintain for 100+ years.

RhodoYolo• 6 years ago

Do you have a list or link to any mega projects you are currently excited about?

rmason2• 6 years ago

Wouldn't it be infinitely cheaper to replace all the cables/fixtures and simply rebuild it? Or have the funders simply lost interest in it?

Is a GoFundMe campaign outside of the realm of possibility? I know that I'd contribute to such a worthy effort, but only if the rest of the players would pledge to fund current operations.

koski_pindora• 6 years ago

I'm sad as well. I was lucky to visit the site 2006.

antognini• 6 years ago

It's been a little while since I dabbled in radio astronomy, but arrays like the VLA use interferometry to produce high resolution images. However, the high resolution is only along the directions between pairs of telescopes. Since you don't have telescopes in all directions, there are some directions with low resolution and others with high resolution. (In the technical parlance they talk about "UV-coverage" and filling the UV plane".) This produces patterns in the Fourier domain that look like this: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~vlbacald/idx/snap_uv.gif. [1]

As the object moves in the sky, these dots move around and sort of "fill out" the image in Fourier space, so you get coverage that could look like this: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~vlbacald/idx/lowd_uv.gif but it's still not 100% full.

The advantage of a telescope that is a single large dish like Arecibo is that this plane is completely filled. The resolution is more or less the same in all directions. The main disadvantage, of course, is that it is embedded in the ground and can only look at what is directly overhead. (They can maneuver the secondary dish to look at things a little bit away from directly overhead, but I seem to remember it only being a few degrees.)

[1]: See this page for those images and more details: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~vlbacald/read.shtml

mumblemumble• 6 years ago

Could this characteristic be mitigated by arranging the telescopes in a random pattern rather than using simple, regular pattern like the VLA follows? That seems like it might be what's going on with the UV coverage diagrams being demonstrated at the bottom of page 3 in this paper about the ATA: https://www.seti.org/sites/default/files/ATA-memo-series/mem...

moonbug• 6 years ago

What comes next?

The Square Kilometre Array

petschge4• 6 years ago

That the US (as of April 2020) does not take any part in.

SiempreViernes3• 6 years ago

Arecibo has been superseded in terms of raw aperture by FAST, and in terms of angular resolution by the interferometry arrays since 1966 at the latest when the One Mile observatory was doing 23 arcsecond resolution images. I think it's main somewhat unique capability was doing radar measurements of things in our solar system.

My impressions is the neglect comes from having done all the useful things it could do ages ago, and not finding anything new to help with in the areas of science that gets funding.

The state of the art interferometry arrays are ASKAP and MeerKAT currently, in the sense of being the newest and being precusors of the SKA which is the biggest project right now.

In terms of best in class, it varies with the specific frequency and which bit of the sky you want to look at and also with what you consider an observatory: the Event Horizon Telescope that resolved the M87 black hole has the worlds best resolution at their mm wavelengths, but it's really a bunch of existing telescopes collaborating and not a purpose built facility.

Gibbon1• 6 years ago

Am I wrong but I remember something that it's resolution sucks because it's not parabolic.

jasonwatkinspdx• 6 years ago

Interferometry can simulate the resolution of a dish corresponding to its baseline but not the sensitivity.

The VLA may simulate the resolution of a 36 km dish, but it has the sensitivity of a 130 meter one, considerably less than Arecibo's 305. You're ultimately limited by signal vs noise and can't make up for the receiving area that simply isn't there, no matter the width of the baseline.

This makes interferometers and stationary giant dishes different tools, suited to different types of observations. Arrays are not good at imaging extended diffuse sources.

RedOrGreen2• 6 years ago

I'm too sad today to engage with this, but you're simply wrong about Arecibo "having done all the useful things it could do ages ago, and not finding anything new".

Here, for example, is Arecibo on the cover of Nature, in 2018: [1]. And you might want to look into NANOGrav [2]: you'll be hearing a lot more about it (I promise) in one or two years, depending on publication timelines.

[1] https://twitter.com/nature/status/951423495107481602 [2] http://nanograv.org/

fuoqi• 6 years ago

what kind of design is going to replace it?

FAST [0] can be considered an Arecibo replacement, see the comparison chapter on the wiki page. Though it is built in China, so some may say that it's not a replacement for the US and the West science community.

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

JshWright• 6 years ago

FAST doesn't have some of the more interesting capabilities of Arecibo (most notably, the ability to perform radar astronomy).

dheera• 6 years ago

Random stupid questions from someone who is not a civil engineer:

(a) Why not replace the cables?

(b) What would they do if the cables on the Golden Gate bridge also corroded like this?

chordalkeyboard2• 6 years ago

judging by other comments, the observatory is obsolete. I believe they regularly paint the cables on the GG bridge in order to protect from corrosion.

dreamcompiler• 6 years ago

The article suggests that the act of replacing the cables could cause a catastrophic failure. My interpretation of this is that unless one could replace all the cables at exactly the same time (which is impossible), at least one more would fail, which would almost certainly cause the instrument pod to fall, destroying the dish and damaging buildings with flying cables.

bitexploder• 6 years ago

SETI at home was always fun back in the day. I always thought it was cool to see data from that telescope.

leoc• 6 years ago

On this website we can't fail to mention the connection to James Burke's Connections: Arecibo Observatory appears in Episode 3 from 43:50 https://youtu.be/eCp8h9RkaSw?list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV... (skip to 47:00 https://youtu.be/eCp8h9RkaSw?list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV... for discussion of the obsevatory), including in some nice aerial shots.

retostamm• 6 years ago

Not a radioastronomer, but it seems like it'd be nice to add a dish the back of (some of the) Starlink satellites. To make an even larger array.

kawfey• 6 years ago

I used to work at the VLA as an RF engineering intern. I learned a lot. There is a good technical answer in these comments already, in regards to reception.

But AO was also a transmitter - it could pump out millions of watts to illuminate asteroids, the moon, and other orbiting objects for mono static and bistatic radar measurements. For example, images such as these [0] are created by receiving the reflection of energy emitted from transmitters like AO and Goldstone (I didn’t find an exact image of an AO-VLA measurement but they’re out there).

The AO and VLA had a unique relationship, in that one could precisely measure and image irregularities of any particular VLA dish panel down to a few tenths of a millimeter using bistatic radar of the moon. It’s somewhere in the eVLA library but my google fu is failing me (also google really sucks now).

They also had a few events for ham radio where AO lit up the moon and hams across the world could hear its reflection with basic equipment. [1]

[0] https://m-cacm.acm.org/careers/182810-high-def-radar-images-...

[1] https://youtu.be/SUr1z5XeOE0

ashtonkem3• 6 years ago

60 years in a tropical environment, no less. The humidity there cannot be kind to steel.

samstave• 6 years ago

Bezos should build an updated one there for his legacy!

asgekar2• 6 years ago

Hi,

A radio astronomer here, and writing opinion for all that's worth.

I visited Arecibo once and stayed for a short project for 3 months. It was awesome, and they have a fabulous small astronomy team doing some really interesting science.

My mentor and long-term collaborator has used this telescope since the 70s, and she will be devastated. This dish has produced so many unexpected discoveries, solid science of highest calibre, and has stayed at the edge of science over 50+ years. It's sad to see such a sudden end.

There are three variants of radio-telescope design:

1. monolith dish (Arecibo or Green Bank) 2. Network of dishes (Very Large Array, or VLA, in New Mexico) 3. Network of individual dipoles (LOFAR in the Netherlands)

One needs to combine all three in some ways to target different classes of astronomical problems. For example, if you want to understand the source structure, separate its left limb from the right, then you need smaller dishes separated by a large distance (like Very Large Array -- VLA). If you are looking at low frequencies of radio light, then you need dipole arrays like LOFAR. On the other hand if you are looking for giant burst of short-term energy, you are collecting light from a distant object. The more you collect, the better it is. So, single dish (or many dishes combined) works very well. Large single dish (Arecibo like) telescopes are also critical to characterize arrays like VLA or LOFAR. So, they are very useful still.

Arecibo's success gave rise to improved design of a single mammoth dish telescopes in China (FAST). So, the design stays relevant and of importance. A new telescope called Square Kilometer Array (of size one square kilometer in effective area) would in principle replace a mammoth dish like Arecibo and tackle very diverse set of problems.

However, Arecibo is like an old Volvo car that kept on going strong. You never want to junk such a old beauty even if you have a swanky Tesla standing outside your door, would you?

Cheers!

sandworm101• 6 years ago

I would add that the one thing arecebo had over fast was a transmit function, a suspended cabin heavy enough to support a radar emitter. If you want to bounce radar off planets, fast wont work.

NickBusey• 6 years ago

I'm so bummed. I was there, almost, once. Went to Puerto Rico, drove all the way there, tiny winding road, took half the day just getting there. Turns out they were closed. Despite calling ahead and their phone message just listing the hours (which we were within).

So, after all that I got to see a fence with a closed sign.

sanguy• 6 years ago

How will we know when the aliens call us?

rovr1384• 6 years ago

They'll knock on the window instead

mNovak• 6 years ago

That's too bad; glad I got a chance to visit a couple years ago.

If anyone is wondering what's next: as others have noted, there's China's FAST antenna. That's a dish format telescope similar (but bigger) to Arecibo. The politics of this inevitably makes some scientists nervous.

There is also the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) coming online soon. This is phased array format, similar to VLA, and covers a similar frequency band as Arecibo (unlike VLA). I have to wonder if this factored into the calculus to let Arecibo go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array

leptons2• 6 years ago

I was in Puerto Rico for a wedding several years ago and made it an absolute non-negotiable must-visit during that trip. No way was I going to be that close and not go see it. So glad I did. It felt like mecca for science nerds. I bought all the souvenirs I could. So sad to see it go.

SiempreViernes3• 6 years ago

There is also the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) coming online soon. This is phased array format, similar to VLA, and covers a similar frequency band as Arecibo (unlike VLA). I have to wonder if this factored into the calculus to let Arecibo go.

In some sense I'm sure it did, but the USA is not a part of the SKA collaboration, so it's not a direct replacement.

pkamb• 6 years ago

Cradle Agent 0:34

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGrFfQpY0Zw

NovemberWhiskey• 6 years ago

So very sad. I visited Arecibo when I was on vacation in PR with my family in 2017. The radio telescope remains one of the most unique and visually impressive things I've ever seen in my travels.

markus_zhang• 6 years ago

Good bye, Fox Mulder.

aurizon• 6 years ago

After reading the article, and the comments here to date, I can see there is no safe way to repair it in place. The first group of engineers failed to anticipate the further subsequent failure that occurred a little later. (raises questions about their competence). If they can safely remove valuable instruments in place for use elswehere - that is what they need to do. Looking at the corrosion everywhere, the bext solution seems to be to safely demolish it in place with explosives and salvage the site. The natural bowl it rested within, might be worth building a new bowl in?, however many advances have been made in the large arrays also described here that may well make it inferior to these arrays the day it is finished. Not being a radio astronomer - I defer to this community to make this decision. We knew you all my life, we loved the work you did, we will never forget you, Arecibo R.I.P....

devenson• 6 years ago

900 ton instrument platform

Is that weight accurate? Sounds too heavy.

major505• 6 years ago

This are some very sad news... this thing was impressivewhen it first came.

eastbayjake• 6 years ago

I was today years old when I found out Arecibo is not part of the Deep Space Network! Sad for the impact to scientific research, but relieved it shouldn't jeopardize e.g., maintaining Voyager contact

frob• 6 years ago

Oh Arecibo, how I will miss thee. I had the luck to tour the observatory in the early teens with a physics conference. Someone pulled a few strings and we got the technical tour. It was amazing and full of facts, but two things still stick with me.

First, Aricebo as a space observatory was a serendipitous accident. It was originally designed just to be an atmospheric observatory. The original idea and calculations for the dish were done in a masters thesis (maybe doctoral) and, it being the late 50s and early 60s, almost immediatly got funding just like anything else at the time with physics or science attached to it. Fast forward a few years. They build the thing and realize the student made a factor-of-10 error in his calculations, but in the right direction. Arecibo was 10x LARGER than it needed to be to do the atmospheric experiments it was designed for. Turns out, they could bounce radio waves off the moon and get a response. They could hit Mercury and hear something. They eventually could even hit Jupiter. (Side fun fact: the range was limited not by the sensitivity of the receiver, but by how far the earth rotated during the flight time of the radio waves. Anything past Jupiter and Arecibo rotated out of the receiving window before the radio burst could return.)

Second, Arecibo isn't just an active radio telescope as mentioned before; it's an active microwave experiment. To study the dynamics of atmospheric plasma, Arecibo could focus microwave transmissions at different altitudes, exciting small patches of air into a plasma. It would then immediately listen to study the cooling and reionization properties of the atmosphere.

Arecibo had a strong run, providing scientific insights for over 50 years. RIP, Arecibo. You maybe have been nestled in mountains down here on Earth, but you were still a Great Observatory to me.

lambda_obrien• 6 years ago

That's cool as hell and why in the world are we all building stupid AI advertising platforms today?

Iolaum• 6 years ago

(Slightly unfair) TLDR: Capitalism and Consumer culture.

DataGata• 6 years ago

If you change "advertising platforms" to the more fundamental "resource producer-resource consumer matching platforms" than it makes a lot of sense.

phendrenad2• 6 years ago

Time to add this to the list of "wonders that we could build at some time in the past, but probably not today"?

anonu• 6 years ago

Its nostalgia now. I remember running Seti@Home from my dorm room back in the day and thinking about all the data this satellite was capturing.

jron• 6 years ago

Drone footage before the damage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1T9ZbytyFo

lavp• 6 years ago

Got to visit it while it was still operational a few years back. It was absolutely unreal, and only then did I realize that I had played it in that exact area in BF4.

Really sad to see it suffered the same ironic fate as in the game.

nappy-doo• 6 years ago

Arecibo played a non-trivial role in my decisions to go to grad school.

I visited Arecibo in the early 90s (sophomore year of college). My family was in PR for a family trip, and as I'm not interested in pools or the beach (which is why my mom and sister went), my dad and I drove up into the hills to see it.

It was before there was any visitor center or tours. There was a little control room with some instruments and a large window you could look in, and a catwalk over to about the edge of the telescope. There was not really much to see, and they weren't set up for people who wanted to visit.

I bought a poster at local giftshop from a dusty bin of Arecibo telescope prints (I was probably the only one who bought one), and the proceeded to go off and get my advanced degree in deep space communications (coding theory and DSP). I would say seeing Arecibo was part of why. I wanted to play with toy like that.

Sorry to see you, Arecibo. At least it had an effect on me.

sbarre• 6 years ago

And did you ever get a chance to play with it?

If not, what is the coolest thing you've gotten to play with?

irrational• 6 years ago

I live in PR for a few years and drove out to see the telescope one day. This was in the days before the Internet, so I didn't know it was only open for visitors on certain days. So, I only got to the front gates. But years later I was watching an X-files episode where they had to go to the telescope. In the episode they were shown driving through a thick jungle over rutted dirt roads. Um... huh, either things had really deteriorated since I had visited or Hollywood takes a lot more artistic license than I would have assumed with something like this.

Now that it is being dismantled, I'm sorry I didn't get to see it that day.

RedOrGreen2• 6 years ago

I'm too sad today to engage with the discussion here, but I'll just mention, for those of you who think that Arecibo has either "outlived its usefulness" or been supplanted by FAST in China:

Here's Arecibo on the cover of Nature in 2018: [1]. Yes, we are doing similar work at FAST as well, but one is not a replacement for the other.

And here's a link to NANOGrav: [2]. I promise that you'll hear more about NANOGrav in a year or two, depending on how publication timelines work out. And it wouldn't be possible without Arecibo - now that it's gone, we have to seriously contemplate how to move on beyond our 15-year data set (already in the can).

[1] https://twitter.com/nature/status/951423495107481602 [2] http://nanograv.org/

ChuckMcM• 6 years ago

Why can't they sell off naming rights to the Observatory and just rebuild it from scratch? I don't care if it is the "Elon Musk Radio Telescope" if it means it gets rebuilt with modern equipment and materials.

I'm guessing you could do the whole thing for less than $300M.

lprd• 6 years ago

This is really sad news :(

I remember seeing this thing in the 1997 movie Contact:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9DuMK0uo1c

OpticalWindows• 6 years ago

Does anyone here know if PR would be an ideal location for space launches? It is closer to the equator and surrounded by ocean. Would conditions caused by the mountains play a non trivial role in making spaceflight and launches cheaper?

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 6 years ago

The Virgin Islands and Anguilla are a big problem for a PR launch site. Even commercial shipping/fishing activity downrange can present a big problem for launches, let alone populated areas.

The lower latitude is a minor help, but it's not huge. Higher elevation is entirely negligible; orbit is about going sideways fast, not going up.

The logistic challenges of operation away from manufacturing and engineering talent in the US would far outweigh any advantages.

conradfr• 6 years ago

I think the Nature article is more complete: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03270-9

stjohnswarts3• 6 years ago

This is a real shame because since currently half the country has decided it doesn't believe in science they probably won't replace it.

imroot• 6 years ago

I'm a Radio Astronomy Enthusiast.

I was at Big Ear the weekend before it was tore down, and it was what really prompted me to get into Radio Astronomy. It's what prompted me to visit Arecibo in the late 90's -- there wasn't much of a visitor's center, but, I was still able to get a tour by someone who was working that day.

I tried to get into OSU's Electrical Engineering Program (my mentor went there, and I had made a lot of friends through him), but, my military service made it impossible for me to find a path forward at OSU, and managed to go to a small private school's engineering school instead.

Radio Astronomy (and, broadcast/ham radio) really helped me shape my engineering prowess to who I am today.

doopy1• 6 years ago

I'm lucky to have had a chance to visit this thing. It was cyberpunk AF. A huge telescope in the jungle.

Zenst• 6 years ago

If they are cunning, they will break up the dish into many sized parts and auction/sell them off to collectors, certainly be interest and would help fund the next big thing.

joshu• 6 years ago

Also of note is the Arecibo Message: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message (and hilariously the Arecibo Answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message#Arecibo_answer... )

pizzicato• 6 years ago

Arecibo features in a lovely short story by Ted Chiang, "The Great Silence": https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...

filoeleven• 6 years ago

Does anyone know what purpose is served by the grid of concrete cylinders beneath the dish seen in this image?

https://www.stlawu.edu/sites/default/files/Arecibo2013_15.jp...

sjruckle• 6 years ago

They look like anchor points for small vertical cables running to the dish. I would guess to keep the dish from moving around when it's windy?

Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

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