When will this year end? Why has God forsaken us?
Or maybe the question is why we forsook him?
Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
181–190 of 337 posts
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did it fail? Was it a lack of ongoing maintenance?
Ultimately, it was old. It wasn’t designed to handle the stresses it experienced, and important things failed. It is possible but far from certain that inspections could have found and fixed cable problems before ultimate failure.
It's also due to the nature of how it was built and assembled. You can't lower the big suspended machinery in the middle without dismantling the dish underneath it.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#1832020 keeps on giving...
OK, things are starting to make sense. It's an alien attack. They created Covid to distract us enough that we wouldn't defend Arecibo. And they're driving Trump insane with their mind control rays just to increase the chaos.
/s, in case anyone couldn't tell...
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've begun imagining that for Defense spending, government money that's spent in a State must have come from that State's federal income taxes. I'm exhausted seeing data that indicates that states like mine put in more money than they get from the Federal government, and watching people from states that receive more than they put in talk about welfare state, wealth redistribution, etc.
No state pays a cent to another state or to the federal government. It is residents of each state that pay federal taxes, which the federal government in turn uses to provide funding and services to states and individuals. The Rockefeller Institute data ( https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-... ) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealth…
> The Rockefeller Institute data (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...) shows that it's not so much "blue states" as frequently claimed, but taxpayers of four very wealthy Northeast states (the Tri-State area plus Massachusetts) that account for the vast bulk of citizens paying more than they receive from the federal government.
Yeaaah… no. It only shows that under the default of 2018 BOP.
If you select the last primary tab and look at the 4 years tally, you will see a picture rather more inline with the "folk knowledge", including that while Californians have had a BOP just shy of positive from 2017, their negative BOP in 2015 and 2016 puts them rather into the negative for the 4 years period. Less so than the tri-state or Colorado, but the picture you're painting is at best misleading.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#185Over 15 years of the US defunding basic research is taking its toll...
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#186Scott Manley made a pretty good video on the issues at Arecibo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE (pre collapse)
He just released an update video following the collapse for those interested.[1] There's also some drone footage of the remains.[2]
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
The FTE employee-count alone underestimates the impact of national-scale science infrastructure. naic.edu is down right now (I suspect they're busy at the moment), but their data is used by tens to hundreds of institutions, each partially employing faculty, postdocs, and students. For agencies like NSF, the science is sometimes almost secondary. What matters perhaps the most is that qualified and capable students con…
> China's larger modern copy of Arecibo (FAST) come on-line in 2016 China's is not really a copy. It does not have transmit capability. What is really missing now in US, and international science is asteroid radar imaging and ranging.
Yeah. And the transmitter piece has been broken since Maria hit, so we've already gone quite some time without that capability.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#188I've heard that radio astronomy was greatly supported by the military because it can be used to monitor for incoming ICBMs. I guess if Arecibo were still used for such purposes, they wouldn't have let it fall into disrepair. How is such monitoring conducted in this day and age?
The anecdote I heard was that it was because there was no good way of getting data on the USSR over-the-horizon radars - other than the times where their signals would reflect off the Moon and could be analyzed by the US, given good enough antennas.
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Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#189When will this year end? Why has God forsaken us?
In two months you'll be asking why did that year end. God was so kind to us back then.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#190I'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…
Official report from the NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=301737