Its nostalgia now. I remember running Seti@Home from my dorm room back in the day and thinking about all the data this satellite was capturing.
Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
201–210 of 315 posts
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#202The 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. Infrastructure can also be maintained and last longer than this, which is why I'm personally sad. Had Arecibo always had the ~60 year timeline, it would've been a bittersweet retirement, like Voyager. In this case I just feel like it's gone before it should. Arecibo has been receiving reduced funding since the early 2000s [1]. The end of an era, although thankf…
I'm sad as well. I was lucky to visit the site 2006.
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, it's location is still surely ideal. But it's clear the construction that's there isn't safe. I wonder if, provided they're able to dismantle the remaining facility without complete collapse, if it'd be reasonable to "rebuild" on the same site. It sounds like the towers should be rebuilt, all of the cables replaced, etc. And obviously the dish at minimum needs repair . I can't imagine anything would be salvag…
Is it an ideal location though? From an astrophysics perspective I bet it's ideal, but from a structural perspective it's still a large steel structure in the tropics that's also simultaneously in both a hurricane and earthquake zone, which to me seems closer to a worst case scenario than a perfect spot to build. Ignoring geopolitical matters I wonder if an installation on the same latitude in the mexican mountains w…
You have a good point, but we also have many decades' worth of engineering improvements that could likely be used to mitigate some of the risks.
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#204Drone footage before the damage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1T9ZbytyFo
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#205Got to visit it while it was still operational a few years back. It was absolutely unreal, and only then did I realize that I had played it in that exact area in BF4.
Really sad to see it suffered the same ironic fate as in the game.
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it be infinitely cheaper to replace all the cables/fixtures and simply rebuild it? Or have the funders simply lost interest in it? Is a GoFundMe campaign outside of the realm of possibility? I know that I'd contribute to such a worthy effort, but only if the rest of the players would pledge to fund current operations.
> Is a GoFundMe campaign outside of the realm of possibility? I know that I'd contribute to such a worthy effort, but only if the rest of the players would pledge to fund current operations. The biggest GoFundMe campaign according to Wikipedia only raised $25 million in 2020 dollars ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe#Notable_projects , Bannon's et al's fraudulent We Build the Wall project). Arecibo cost $9.3 mi…
Wikipedia itself raises more than $120 million per year. I don't think a telescope could attract as much in donations as Wikipedia, but it is interesting to see how high could donations possibly go.
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Arecibo Observatory is not closing. They're only dismantling that structure. They can continue to conduct science there.
The structure holds the instruments through which they conduct science.
>Ralph Gaume, director of NSF’s astronomy division, said at the briefing the agency wants to preserve other instruments at the site, as well as the visitor and outreach center.
It sounds like the big fancy telescope will stop conducting science but these huge projects tend to attract ancillary projects.
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really depends on the structure. Giant steel objects are much harder to keep intact, to the point where non iconic objects are easier to replace once than maintain for 100+ years.
Giant steel objects are much harder to keep intact, to the point where non iconic objects are easier to replace once than maintain for 100+ years. What about the Eiffel Tower? Or Blackpool Tower. That proves it can be done.
Those are both made of iron.
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#209Earlier 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).
In a way, it's a mirror to the lowest common denominator of human nature. As should be expected if you think about it. A lot of our instincts don't scale well, e.g. eating too much sugar and fat when it's in abundance, because it used to be evolutionarily advantageous. So do we throw our hands up and say that's inevitable, or try to incentivize our better selves?
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance” — Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
Re: Arecibo telescope, on the brink of collapse, will be dismantled
#210The 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…
Arecibo has been superseded in terms of raw aperture by FAST, and in terms of angular resolution by the interferometry arrays since 1966 at the latest when the One Mile observatory was doing 23 arcsecond resolution images. I think it's main somewhat unique capability was doing radar measurements of things in our solar system. My impressions is the neglect comes from having done all the useful things it could do ages…
Interferometry can simulate the resolution of a dish corresponding to its baseline but not the sensitivity.
The VLA may simulate the resolution of a 36 km dish, but it has the sensitivity of a 130 meter one, considerably less than Arecibo's 305. You're ultimately limited by signal vs noise and can't make up for the receiving area that simply isn't there, no matter the width of the baseline.
This makes interferometers and stationary giant dishes different tools, suited to different types of observations. Arrays are not good at imaging extended diffuse sources.