Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

nsf.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 248 posts

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#221

Post by im3w1l »

wolrah wrote: post #207
siliconmountain wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The drones were being used by the engineers on site who to monitor things and help plan for the intended demolition. It was more or less pure luck that one happened to be there at the time it happened. 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 f…

Some neat things going on there regarding the cable. If I see it correctly, it looks like a few fibers snap at 0:02. Then nothing happens until 0:05. Stepping frame by frame with comma and period, it seems like a few more fibers snap, after which the strain is too much and the cable just explodes.

Cable number 2 goes in a more gradual way.

And on cable 3 there is a prominent wave before it falls to the ground.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#222

Post by lovemenot »

jessriedel wrote: post #182
lovemenot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairly sure that's a native Dutch speaker. e.g. "Thingss" rather than "thingz"

Hmm, you could be right of course, but I had a few Dutch friends in grad school and this did not remind me of their accents at all.

I lived in Rotterdam for a while before internet was so widespread.

It's a Dutch person. They were always good at English and sounded like this.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#223

Post by inciampati »

wolrah wrote: post #207
siliconmountain wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The drones were being used by the engineers on site who to monitor things and help plan for the intended demolition. It was more or less pure luck that one happened to be there at the time it happened. 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 f…

During the press conference the NSF gave they indicated that the drone monitoring was continuous. They had a drone up to inspect the array every few hours. It was probably under drone observation for a significant fraction of the time.

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#224

Post by baq »

admiralspoo wrote: post #185
outworlder wrote: post #106

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.

wouldn't it be nice to have something worth defending with that F-35?

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#225

Post by ianai »

freeone3000 wrote: post #208
valuearb wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The astronomer community couldn't save it the same reason they can't build a new one - these are national projects, funded from national funds. The scale of academic science funding is simply on the wrong scale for major projects like Arecibo, or CERN, or the NIF. No grant of a few thousand dollars is going to crowdsource a radiotelescope. In any event, the NSF would be the one giving the astronomers the funds in the…

What’s a good budget to get it done?

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#226

Post by ngcc_hk »

wolrah wrote: post #207
siliconmountain wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The drones were being used by the engineers on site who to monitor things and help plan for the intended demolition. It was more or less pure luck that one happened to be there at the time it happened. 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 f…

Thanks. Wonder as well. That is the remaining two cables?

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#227

Post by caf »

wolrah wrote: post #209
Gibbon1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Arecibo was also a massively powerful radar transmitter, used to map other bodies in our solar system and arguably more importantly to get precise position and trajectory information for the various objects floating around out there. Losing it is a massive hit to our ability to accurately track potential asteroid threats. Now we're down to just Goldstone, which is both much less powerful and has a much smaller dish.

Does Goldstone do radar astronomy that the other two DSN sites don't?

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#228

Post by gitrog »

im3w1l wrote: post #221
wolrah wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drones were being used by the engineers on site who to monitor things and help plan for the intended demolition. It was more or less pure luck that one happened to be there at the time it happened. 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 f…

Some neat things going on there regarding the cable. If I see it correctly, it looks like a few fibers snap at 0:02. Then nothing happens until 0:05. Stepping frame by frame with comma and period, it seems like a few more fibers snap, after which the strain is too much and the cable just explodes. Cable number 2 goes in a more gradual way. And on cable 3 there is a prominent wave before it falls to the ground.

Side note: thank you for mentioning the shortcut keys to skip frames. I did not know that!

Re: Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse

#229

Post by interestica »

ehnto wrote: post #131
jessriedel wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone please characterize that accent/cadence to me?!? It reminds me very strongly of an accent I've been hearing on tech support telephone call frequently in the past 5 years but never recalled hearing before that. I have a pet theory that it's actually from a new technique for more rapidly teaching intelligible English pronunciation to folks learning it as a second language. But maybe it's just an accent from…

Sounds like a Northern to North Eastern European accent to me. But I will say that YouTubers have their own accents that permeate different genres of videos as well, which can add ambiguity. My favourite accent tidbit is the English voice of the Shinkansen in Japan. It is voiced by an Australian, imitating a Canadian, who was imitating a British accent. The result is a totally ambiguous accent that sounds almost disc…

> But I will say that YouTubers have their own accents that permeate different genres of videos as well, which can add ambiguity.

That's like the modern version of the "mid-Atlantic" accent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

Post reply on HN