151–160 of 337 posts
Sad to see this experiment come to an end.
"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
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 t…
Wikipedia has a decently comprehensive summary of the funding cutbacks Arecibo faced: 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-...
> 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.
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
https://www.space.com/arecibo-observatory-loss-for-planetary...
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
https://www.space.com/arecibo-observatory-loss-for-planetary...
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.
"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.
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 mo…
I wish we'd go back to calling the "Defense Department" the "War Department" as it was originally called. And stop calling it "expensive defense projects" but "expensive war projects". Call it for what it really isn't. We aren't defending ourselves from anyone. We are the one's attacking everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Washington DC isn't a state because it was literally created to not be a state. If they want to give DC residents voting rights they should make it impossible to be a DC resident and instead anyone who lives within DC should vote as part of the state the land was taken from for federal elections. That solves everyone's problems (well aside from the democrats who are trying to get another 2 seats in the senate). Local…
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…