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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

#141

Post by esoterae »

VerDeTerre wrote: post #113
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.

How about giant airbag and mating structures underneath the gondola, shaped-charge the cables, and then just let the air out to bring it down to the ground.

Just inflating something like that would take some weight off the cables and allow a more controlled and safer process.

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

#142

Post by javert »

ardy42 wrote: post #70
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…

> 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, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore? China already built one: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-china-world-largest-radio-tele... . Given that it's nonmilitary US government infrastr…

The government does not cut the budget. It is ever-growing.

Republicans lower taxes sometimes.

They re-allocate budget from one thing to another.

They don't cut the budget.

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

#143

Post by JshWright »

fuoqi wrote: post #140
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…

>what kind of design is going to replace it? FAST [0] can be considered an Arecibo replacement, see the comparison chapter on the wiki page. Though it is built in China, so some may say that it's not a replacement for the US and the West science community. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

FAST doesn't have some of the more interesting capabilities of Arecibo (most notably, the ability to perform radar astronomy).

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

#145

Post by sigstoat »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #119
zaroth wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

you think that the "don't buy 2 F-35s and fix arecibo" train of thought ends at fixing arecibo? like, if the military hawks would just give up enough budget to fix it, all the other cries to reduce their budget would cease?

come on.

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

#146

Post by trboyden »

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…

Yet government space travel is dead, and private space travel (SpaceX) is booming. So there's that. Just because it doesn't happen on your timeline doesn't mean private is inferior to government. It means private is waiting for it to be financially feasible. Which if the government did things that way, we wouldn't be $136 trillion dollars in debt.

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

#147

Post by hindsightbias »

mlindner wrote: post #128
kitd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf China has one that's half a kilometer wide, so there's still hope for progress :) http://www.hexapolis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Worlds-L...

The China one doesn't have the ability to transmit, only receive.

They take the Trisolarans seriously.

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

#148

Post by bullfightonmars »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #82
ardy42 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore? China already built one: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-china-world-largest-radio-tele... . Given that it's nonmilitary US government infrastr…

It wasn't nonmilitary, it's military use has just come to an end. In a small sidenote of an absolutely magnificent lecture by Steve Blank, the Secret History of Silicon Valley [0], he notes that the reason the radio telescopes were built in the 60's was because the Soviets were using air defense radars in their interiors that were hard to get information on using other methods that were available, but a few times a m…

Well that is fascinating. I am reading The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

Part of the plot is that a radio astronomer at Arecibo discovers intermittent Alien radio signals originating from the Alpha Centari System. The protagonists can't figure out why the Alpha Centari's are transmitting such strong radio signals and why they are intermittent. It turns out that their planet doesn't have an ionosphere to reflect broadcast radio waves, so the inhabitants instead bounce radio off the moon to broadcast it back to the surface.

Arecibo only picked up the radio signals when they bounced off the moon at the right angle.

The origin of radio telescopes in the 60s must be the kernel for that bit of plot.

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

#150

Post by Florin_Andrei »

javert wrote: post #142
ardy42 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, but now that it's 60 years after its original design, what kind of design is going to replace it? Do we even need giant monolith dishes anymore? China already built one: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-china-world-largest-radio-tele... . Given that it's nonmilitary US government infrastr…

The government does not cut the budget. It is ever-growing. Republicans lower taxes sometimes. They re-allocate budget from one thing to another. They don't cut the budget.

It's almost as if this is correlated with the population increase. Almost.
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