201–210 of 248 posts
And every time I see it, my heart aches for the science. RIP Arecibo, you did not deserve this fate.
Why not? Should we pour money into antiquated and inefficient designs at the expense of newer designs that will be far more effective?
Anybody want to start increasing government R&D funding yet?
The loss of Arecibo is painful and we have certainly lost capability but it isn't as bad as it looks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25273623
https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFRqstAppropHist/NSFRequestsand...
Are they going to clean that up? Is "decommissioning" just a fancy word for "leaving a big pile of garbage in the woods?"
Well it is operated by the National Science Foundation. So we can hope that they have an interest in preserving the forest floor below. But then again, with budget cuts and the decreasing budgets that science and climate organizations have been getting from the government lately, this is entirely possible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25273623
https://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/NSFRqstAppropHist/NSFRequestsand...
Why were they filming? As in why was the drone in place and looking at a close-up of the cable?
This is quite the coincidence. The drone operator seemed prepared for exactly what was coming.
It feels like the death of American ingenuity. We've fallen from the era where we sent echoes to our neighbours and the stars. When we found clearings in jungles and turned them into monuments to humanity. The time when we put our best foot forward and reached ahead, into the future, racing towards a brighter tomorrow for humanity. I mourn for what has been lost. The American century wasn't punctuated by a war, but b…
Uh, no. Arecibo was quite a low priority for the NSF/NASA for good reasons -- there are other, better, telescopes and facilities to fund.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could build an entirely new one from scratch if we decided to manufacture one less F-35.
Well, the F-35 is actually a useful instrument which maintains US hegemony. A better comparison would be the movie Cats, which had a budget of 95 million, and serves no purpose to society.
Scott Manley synced up the footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSSrEowtIOo
I'm amazed they had a drone up there to catch that. Were they flying drones multiple times a day just to catch this footage?
Unfortunately for the viewing public it was facing the wrong way for the spectacle, but it'll probably be a fixture in engineering classrooms for years to come as a real world example of cable failure caught on video from up close.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was still way more requests for observing time and the total amount of time available in the last cycles. Also there is a lot of value to have long-term datasets that are recorded with the same instruments as it removes a lot of systematics. Nanograph is being badly bitten by that, as they use pulsar timing data over 10 or 12 years. (And were likely only 1 or 2 years away from results, which may now be delayed…
Are requests a valid measurement of value? Why didn't the astronomer community band together to save it? They've funded a good number of very expensive telescopes the last 20 years, the fact they didn't fund refurbishment here sees to tell a great deal about its actual value over building new radio telescopes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any urge to point out that, sometime in the future, someone will make the same noises about their work? :-)
The thing with Arecibo it's not the design you want in in a microwave observatory at all. Same as the Space Shuttle which spent decades siphoning off a good chunk of of the budget for space stuff. It was white elephant.
Now we're down to just Goldstone, which is both much less powerful and has a much smaller dish.
Is the loss of Arecibo a big blow to the scientific community? I was of the impression that Arecibo was long past it's heyday and in general that large arrays of smaller receivers were now considered superior.
Allow me to gently contradict the previous responders. The community of radio astronomers is feeling the loss of Arecibo very keenly. I've mentioned this in a previous comment [1] so I won't rehash it again, but here [2] is a statement from the NANOGrav collaboration - we have been using the Arecibo telescope on a weekly basis (along with the Green Bank telescope) to observe a large number of radio pulsars for over 1…