The fact that they let it collapse so bad instead of properly decommissioning it does not look on America, or at least America's treatment of PR.
Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
191–200 of 337 posts
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#192I just did a simple calculation of the weight of the instrument platform, listed at 900 tons. The maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 787 is just over 500,000 pounds, or 250 tons ... so the instrument platform was the equivalent of three fully loaded 787s, plus two M1A1 tanks piled on for good measure.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'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.
> I'm exhausted seeing data that indicates that states like mine put in more money than they get from the Federal government
I'll assume you're from California, so you should know that California is now break-even with the Federal government.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#194"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.
It's funny you call out military spending, when military spending is what paid for this dish to be built in the first place. NASA decided this dish wasn't worth even a few million a year in funding. Perhaps this dish simply wasn't worth maintaining? Which is the conclusion multiple organizations seemed to have settled on.
> NASA decided this dish wasn't worth even a few million a year in funding
Clearly they never consulted the deep bench of expertise on HN and Reddit.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the F-35 makes jobs... I wonder about that. It's been a while since I studied, but the phrase "deadweight loss" looms large in what I remember of the one economics class I took in college. So I wouldn't be surprised if the program is actually a net negative for job creation. Only that doesn't matter, either, because the point is not to create more jobs; the point is to influence job creation in a way that benefi…
I haven't really looked into it all beyond a superficial level, but I certainly think that things like the F-35 program are a net negative to society when viewed at a distance. As another example, I wonder if Wisconsin's sweetheart deal with Foxconn actually had a negative impact on employment. Clearly Foxconn's promised jobs never materialized, but the threat of them coming to town to spend big money may have had a…
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Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#196"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…
The F-35 is an example of the broken window parable[1] writ large. Sure it created a bunch of jobs, but that same money could have created a similar number of jobs while accomplishing something useful. I often wonder what the eventual consequences of this kind of resource misallocation will be for the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#197I'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
Very cool, that matches it. According to Wolfram Alpha, 7:55 a.m. Atlantic Standard Time is 11:55 UTC.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#198Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#199I'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…
Interesting! You should write this up. Your comment has more content than most Medium articles that I’ve seen.
Thanks! I mainly just googled together this stuff in a matter of 1-2 hours. So it was an afternoon project :). But maybe I'll write it into a nice format. It wasn't trivial because the WWW interfaces only show earthquakes but this event was likely only registered by one station and had too low magnitude to be registered by others, and was thus filtered out.
Re: Arecibo Observatory Collapsed
#200Great! Now they can replace it with something new instead of trying to salvage outdated equipment, software and engineers!
Is there still a use case for a new dish built into the same natural bowl? Why not build somewhere else? If there had never been an Arecibo at that location would someone actually pick it today to site a new scope? Not trying to diss all that has been accomplished with Arecibo just wonder if there are not better places to direct funding, assuming it can be found.
I think the benefits of that location were
1: Relatively close to the equator
2: Relatively low noise floor
Even though there are places that probably meet those criteria better than PR, the US Government wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole for political reasons