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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

#111

Post by ars »

ardy42 wrote: post #79
IronRanger wrote: post #7

Is this a symbol of the degradation of human intellectual capability in the 21st century?

> 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…

As someone else wrote in this thread, US funding of these types of projects has gone up not down.

This is simply a decision on which kind of projects to fund not a reduction in science as a whole.

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

#112

Post by mixmastamyk »

mikepurvis wrote: post #77
jlmorton wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a reflection of the damage caused by a Category 5 hurricane, and subsequent tropical storm.

Part of "infrastructure" is the capability and willingness to deal with the aftermath of severe weather events.

AKA "maintenance."

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

#113

Post by VerDeTerre »

xianhn wrote: post #58

Sad day. I worked in radio astronomy and stayed on site for a week a few years back. Amazing telescope, the scale of it has to be seen to be believed. They have had serious funding issues for some time now, so now that it needs repair, I figured they might retire it. Unfortunate for all the staff that work there, it employed quite a few people. RIP Arecibo.

I would not have guessed the scale. The article says the instrument platform weighs 900 tons, which is amazing to imagine. At first, I wondered if they could use a helicopter to bring it down safely, but it's like two or three 747s on a tight rope.

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

#114

Post by petschge »

mumblemumble wrote: post #110
antognini wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You can improve UV coverage a bit but removing redundant duplicate baselines. Which is what pseudo-random patterns do. And these are used e.g. by Lofar. But the problem of lacking very small baselines to fill in very large scales on the sky remains. Interferometer are simply not very good for imaging extended objects. And of course the other thing is that you might have less reflective area in total and thus lower sensitivity for dim things.

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

#115

Post by ars »

meowphius wrote: post #38

I cannot believe they are shutting it down over a broken cable.

The article said that they determined that if two cables broke already it means the other cables are not strong enough either.

Which means replacement is the only option and apparently they decided there's no way to replace it without dismantling it.

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

#116

Post by rootusrootus »

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.

I don't know if tiny is the word I'd use. ~3% is smaller than ~5%, yes, but still an absurd amount of money.

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

#117

Post by dylan604 »

xianhn wrote: post #58

Sad day. I worked in radio astronomy and stayed on site for a week a few years back. Amazing telescope, the scale of it has to be seen to be believed. They have had serious funding issues for some time now, so now that it needs repair, I figured they might retire it. Unfortunate for all the staff that work there, it employed quite a few people. RIP Arecibo.

RIP El Radar

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

#119

Post by deeeeplearning »

zaroth wrote: post #108
admiralspoo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You think that removing 2 F-35s from the budget will significantly alter that calculus?

To be clear. The US' >5000 Nuclear warheads is more than enough to cement its place as the most important military power in the world.

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