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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

#211

Post by angus-prune »

dgr582systems wrote: post #194
Retric wrote: post #99

Earlier 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.

Like the (iconic) Sydney Harbour Bridge which requires continuous repainting. It’s very expensive to maintain. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/ag-blog/2013/1...

Constant painting is also a sign of efficiency.

Rather than a large number of people painting it for a small period of time, which requires a startup and close down overhead; they have instead resourced it so that they can keep a small number of people employed permenantly who accumulate expertise and minimise the mobilisations costs.

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

#212

Post by headcanon »

kgin wrote: post #34

When I was 5 years old, I saw a pbs documentary about the Arecibo telescope. During a shot of a huge expanse of the telescope's metal, the narrator said something to the effect of "as one gets closer to the equator the sun's rays are stronger and the metal becomes too hot to touch". This, combined with the fact that I had a globe with a raised ridge around the equator, caused me to assume (for many years) that the eq…

I've got a similar anecdote from when I was around the same age. When I first heard about the American Civil War and the idea of the South seceding from the union, I had just seen this cartoon [1] and thought that they literally took a saw through the Mason-Dixon line to physically separate the regions, and the South would just float away.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98&ab_channel=fukTr...

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

#213

Post by nappy-doo »

Arecibo played a non-trivial role in my decisions to go to grad school.

I visited Arecibo in the early 90s (sophomore year of college). My family was in PR for a family trip, and as I'm not interested in pools or the beach (which is why my mom and sister went), my dad and I drove up into the hills to see it.

It was before there was any visitor center or tours. There was a little control room with some instruments and a large window you could look in, and a catwalk over to about the edge of the telescope. There was not really much to see, and they weren't set up for people who wanted to visit.

I bought a poster at local giftshop from a dusty bin of Arecibo telescope prints (I was probably the only one who bought one), and the proceeded to go off and get my advanced degree in deep space communications (coding theory and DSP). I would say seeing Arecibo was part of why. I wanted to play with toy like that.

Sorry to see you, Arecibo. At least it had an effect on me.

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

#214

Post by lightlyused »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #193
SiempreViernes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Am I wrong but I remember something that it's resolution sucks because it's not parabolic.

May be true, but its real value was has a radar.

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

#215

Post by irrational »

I live in PR for a few years and drove out to see the telescope one day. This was in the days before the Internet, so I didn't know it was only open for visitors on certain days. So, I only got to the front gates. But years later I was watching an X-files episode where they had to go to the telescope. In the episode they were shown driving through a thick jungle over rutted dirt roads. Um... huh, either things had really deteriorated since I had visited or Hollywood takes a lot more artistic license than I would have assumed with something like this.

Now that it is being dismantled, I'm sorry I didn't get to see it that day.

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

#216

Post by lightlyused »

bullfightonmars wrote: post #148
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 broa…

The Sparrow is an excellent but distributing book.

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

#217

Post by RedOrGreen »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #127
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…

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…

I'm too sad today to engage with this, but you're simply wrong about Arecibo "having done all the useful things it could do ages ago, and not finding anything new".

Here, for example, is Arecibo on the cover of Nature, in 2018: [1]. And you might want to look into NANOGrav [2]: you'll be hearing a lot more about it (I promise) in one or two years, depending on publication timelines.

[1] https://twitter.com/nature/status/951423495107481602 [2] http://nanograv.org/

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

#218

Post by edmundsauto »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #179
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…

China built a bigger one called FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) at a cost of 1.2 billion USD. The political leaders of the CCP are all trained engineers and it helps not having to explain your actions to fickle voters.

> The political leaders of the CCP are all trained engineers

I've heard this a lot, and I know they value engineering as a cultural trait, but according to a quick search, it doesn't seem as prevalent now. Around 2010, apparently 8 of 9 Politburo members were scientists or engineers, but that appears to have dropped in recent years.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...

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

#219

Post by brnt »

angus-prune wrote: post #211
dgr582systems wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the (iconic) Sydney Harbour Bridge which requires continuous repainting. It’s very expensive to maintain. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/ag-blog/2013/1...

Constant painting is also a sign of efficiency. Rather than a large number of people painting it for a small period of time, which requires a startup and close down overhead; they have instead resourced it so that they can keep a small number of people employed permenantly who accumulate expertise and minimise the mobilisations costs.

Now I really want to know what it's like working on the team that repaints the bridge for years or decades on end.

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

#220

Post by RedOrGreen »

I'm too sad today to engage with the discussion here, but I'll just mention, for those of you who think that Arecibo has either "outlived its usefulness" or been supplanted by FAST in China:

Here's Arecibo on the cover of Nature in 2018: [1]. Yes, we are doing similar work at FAST as well, but one is not a replacement for the other.

And here's a link to NANOGrav: [2]. I promise that you'll hear more about NANOGrav in a year or two, depending on how publication timelines work out. And it wouldn't be possible without Arecibo - now that it's gone, we have to seriously contemplate how to move on beyond our 15-year data set (already in the can).

[1] https://twitter.com/nature/status/951423495107481602 [2] http://nanograv.org/

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