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Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

sciencemag.org

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Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#101

Post by rovr138 »

boardwaalk wrote: post #59

I loved seeing this thing when I visited PR, before the hurricane and all the rest. This makes me very sad :_(. I wonder how they could have built it to be longer-lived/more maintainable. Did they not put enough thought into cable replacement when putting a bunch of add’l load onto it? Perhaps working without enough margin? Also, it might not be intensely obvious from pictures, but this thing is in the middle of rain…

> So it’s not all surprising it would degrade quickly.

Not surprising and easy to work into maintenance costs.

The problem, like with many things on the island, is actually doing the maintenance.

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#103

Post by mNovak »

That's too bad; glad I got a chance to visit a couple years ago.

If anyone is wondering what's next: as others have noted, there's China's FAST antenna. That's a dish format telescope similar (but bigger) to Arecibo. The politics of this inevitably makes some scientists nervous.

There is also the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) coming online soon. This is phased array format, similar to VLA, and covers a similar frequency band as Arecibo (unlike VLA). I have to wonder if this factored into the calculus to let Arecibo go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#104

Post by admiralspoo »

petschge wrote: post #96
singemonkey wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick and probably very inaccurate calculation Arecibo cost $9.3 million in 1963. This is equal to $79,000,000 now ( https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1963?amount=93000... ). An F-35 costs about $100 million. Based on that, I'd be happy to give up a single F-35 to rebuild Arecibo.

And the US is planning to purchase 2500 of those. Because 2400 are clearly not enough.

The defense budget is tiny compared to the US's welfare state programs.

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#105

Post by rovr138 »

gk1 wrote: post #16

Shoot. I had the chance to see it this year but decided to drive past instead. (It is somewhat off the main road that surrounds Puerto Rico.) Granted, most of the island was still without electricity because of the M6.4 earthquake that shook the island two days before, and I had other priorities at the time (eg, tsunamis, survival)...

The one in January? It was probably closed. The earthquakes did some damage.

Glad to hear you at least where able to explore other areas of the island and not just San Juan and metro areas.

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#107

Post by zaroth »

protoster wrote: post #4
Communitivity wrote: post #2

This is horrible. Arecibo is still crucial in radio astronomy experiments ongoing as of 2019. It should be repaired, until a replacement is built.

As the article explains, it has been deemed to be unsafe to repair. What's probably missing in that sentence is "...within an acceptable budget."

Speaking with absolutely no expertise in the matter, I would guess it’s on the verge of collapse due to lack of maintenance or fatal design flaw. It’s probably no longer a matter of fixing more like a total rebuild would be required?

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#108

Post by zaroth »

admiralspoo wrote: post #104
petschge wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the US is planning to purchase 2500 of those. Because 2400 are clearly not enough.

The defense budget is tiny compared to the US's welfare state programs.

It also affords the US a position as the world’s reserve currency which itself is worth trillions of dollars.

I’m not sure the ROI analysis is particularly straightforward, all things considered.

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#109

Post by WWLink »

mschuster91 wrote: post #87
ardy42 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century? No, it's a symbol of the degradation of US political capability in the 21st century. To be more explicit: why build a telescope like this if you axiomatically believe the free market will do everything worth doing and that the government projects are waste by definition? There was a time when those ideas weren't so dominant, a…

It turns out the free market is extremely good at innovation, but horrible for maintenance or long lived projects - as soon as something is not deemed "profitable" any more, it gets shut down. No matter how useful it is for literally millions of people (Google Reader comes to a mind).

There's also demand for the things that shouldn't need to be profitable, to be profitable. I saw a news article like a week ago making a HUGE STINK about how a bridge was "losing tons of money" when they looked at the bridge toll vs the expenses. A.. publicly owned bridge, of course! And they made it sound scandalous.

Like seriously. What? It's like people talking about how unprofitable public transit is.....

That's not really the point, is it?

Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled

#110

Post by mumblemumble »

antognini wrote: post #84
floatrock wrote: post #64

The thing was iconic... even if not everyone watching/playing Goldeneye knew it was a real radio telescope, it was nevertheless one of those science megaprojects that featured prominently in the popular zeitgeist and got more than one young kid excited about what's out there in the stars. But infrastructure ages, and 60 years isn't a bad run. What comes next? Clearly there's going to be a capabilities gap for a while…

It's been a little while since I dabbled in radio astronomy, but arrays like the VLA use interferometry to produce high resolution images. However, the high resolution is only along the directions between pairs of telescopes. Since you don't have telescopes in all directions, there are some directions with low resolution and others with high resolution. (In the technical parlance they talk about "UV-coverage" and fil…

Could this characteristic be mitigated by arranging the telescopes in a random pattern rather than using simple, regular pattern like the VLA follows? That seems like it might be what's going on with the UV coverage diagrams being demonstrated at the bottom of page 3 in this paper about the ATA: https://www.seti.org/sites/default/files/ATA-memo-series/mem...
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