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Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

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Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#81

Post by skuhn »

the8472 wrote: post #71
Arubis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours is a convincing argument. How do we get better optics on this for the public at large, so as to better present arguments for funding science?

If it works for defense projects... Calculate how many jobs it takes to build a thing. Keep building things. Advertise job numbers?

It would be nice to fix the societal issue that ties up people's self-worth, status and sheer survival with their job, but that's a much bigger ask. Now you're into things like universal healthcare, UBI, mental health, education, etc. Still, we should work towards improvements on all fronts.

I think that in today's world, if you want science to get funded like defense projects, you'll have to embrace all of the grossness of defense projects. Lobbyists, sub-contractors, patriotic jingoism, fear, etc. Look at how we got to the moon.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#82

Post by Reason077 »

clon wrote: post #7

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

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.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#83

Post by demygale »

dmurray wrote: post #41
bipson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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…

[flagged]

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#84

Post by lotsofpulp »

tt433 wrote: post #68
wavefunction wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's high time for Puerto Rico to become a US state. Puerto Rico has twice the population of the two Dakotas combined and the only way they'll receive more-equitable treatment is if they become a state. I think the will is there locally but there has been resistance from established political factions in the US who fear a place that might tip the balance of power one way or the other.

They recently voted for statehood in a plebescite. I believe the official GOP platform does actually support statehood, but I'm of the view that GOP politicians and voters don't actually know what their platform is beyond revanchism

Obviously, they will official support it for cosmetic purposes of promoting “democracy”. In practice, however, they know it will cause them to lose power, so they won’t vote for it.

Same reason Washington DC residents don’t have representation in the Senate. Or why the popular vote does not matter for the president.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#85

Post by Accujack »

SeeManDo wrote: post #67

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

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.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#86

Post by skuhn »

Frondo wrote: post #75
skuhn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, and I'll go a step further. The US should not have any colonial territories or federal districts where US citizens live who have second-class rights compared to citizens of the 50 states. That means DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa (collectively 3.8 million US citizens) should all be made states. There are undoubtedly lots of issues and h…

I'll go even further: find a way to grant them all the rights of citizenship (representation for their taxation) and let them decide for themselves on statehood. If there's any downside (I honestly don't know, maybe there is?), those people should be given the choice to determine their course of action for themselves. But I agree completely, having people who pay taxes and can't access all the machinery of government…

I think we're maxed out on this thread for who to enfranchise, which is good!

I believe one of the big downsides for citizens of Puerto Rico that has caused issues with the push for statehood is that they don't currently pay federal income tax. So it isn't exactly a taxation-without-representation situation, but they are obviously at the mercy of the US in many ways and don't have access to all of the levers of power that are available to others.

Witness the suffering at our delay in suspending the Jones Act (requiring two days of debate) during the Hurricane Maria relief campaign.

I doubt that Puerto Rico's lot would fundamentally change if they were a separate country though, they would still be largely at the mercy of their main trading partner and dominant regional power (the US).

I was also thinking of felons in my earlier comment, but it didn't quite fit my narrative. I don't find the rationale that they would just vote for there to be no laws particularly compelling.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#87

Post by jbay808 »

moftz wrote: post #57
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to adopt similar strategies for getting e.g. green energy production off the ground. Thinking of things like solar panel production.

Except there is money to be made in the green energy industry. There's no money to be made building a giant radio telescope. Sometimes corporations have a need for scientific institutions and their patronage helps keep the lights on but I really can't think of any way that can apply to something meant to stare at the stars. What could help is designing a radio telescope that have both scientific use and military use…

As proof of your point, Arecibo was originally built as a military project with general scientific value as a bonus.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#88

Post by est31 »

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/

[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

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#89

Post by nikisweeting »

fanf2 wrote: post #55
rurban wrote: post #39

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 The remaining bigs: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600

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

Pretty sure parent is referring to asteroid & space debris trajectory tracking, which Arecibo was used for.

Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed

#90

Post by spiritplumber »

skuhn wrote: post #70
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to adopt similar strategies for getting e.g. green energy production off the ground. Thinking of things like solar panel production.

There was a brief push by the government to encourage funding of things like Solyndra under Obama, but obviously that didn't all pan out. I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it. Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but…

I was asked to do a bit of robotics consulting for Solyndra. I figured that it wasn't going to work out when the guy we talked to took us to a conference room that looked too nice, and admitted that he hadn't been on the production floor in the next building before me and my buddy asked to go check that out.

We took the job anyway because it looked interesting, started doing the preliminaries, and when we went to get the test panels a couple weeks later, a FBI lady shooed us away from the parking lot as they were taping the building up.

Very weird.

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