Yes, I gather that’s pretty much what happened. Thanks for linking to the documentary!
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I remember reading about the Arecibo “ear” and seeing a picture of it in a children’s science book back in the 1970s. It was really seen as a scientific wonder during the first two decades of its operation. Sad to see it go.
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Sic transit gloria mundi.
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How many Aricebos could we build with even 1% of Jeff Bezos’s earnings since the start of the pandemic?
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It’s distinctive. We’re used to seeing radio telescopes as parabolic dishes.
Arecibo of course of course is fixed, with the feed moveable for aiming. If you see it, yiu know it’s Arecibo.
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How about take down the 600 ton transceiver and replace it with a lightweight platform where one happy mutant can sit and whisper messages to the aliens.
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My daughter and I took a three day vacation to Puerto Rico in 2017. We rented a car and made a pilgrimage to Arecibo. It’s an icon, and something I’d always wanted to visit ever since reading about it in the 1970s (and yes, because of Goldeneye and Contact). It’s quite a drive from the “touristy” area of PR around San Juan. It did not disappoint. There is a lovely little museum there. I was glad to see that a university had saved it around that time with needed funding. Puerto Rico has really been kicked in the groin repeatedly since we visited, and it was struggling then. It’s such a shame. It’s a lovely little island, and the people we met there were great.
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I love the Arecibo telescope, both for real and fictional exploits, but frankly, it’s terribly obsolete and inefficient in almost every way, compared to radio interferometry via large arrays of radio telescopes, all over the world.
Interferometry emulates a telescope with the diameter of the distance between the farthest-separated telescopes in any given array, with resolution improved by multiple telescopes. VLBI (Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry) can give the functional (rough) equivalent of a telescope the size of Earth!
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It’s all Sean Bean’s fault.
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China has a bigger version.
Could mean that the design has some life in it, but Arecibo was too small to produce cutting edge results.
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It was however capable of use as a radar…I seem to recall Dave Tholen saying it has value for characterizing orbits of PHA. Seems doomed at this stage anyway, sad
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This happens to be part of my day job. I’m an engineer who works on a couple telescopes in Arizona and one at the south Pole, which all do VLBI work in addition to their regular duties of molecular spectroscopy and cosmic background radiation detection, respectively.
However, Arecibo did a lot of different work that VLBI can’t handle, such as atmospheric and radar. It’s too bad that it’s not a whizbang field that can get funding these days.
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You have a cool job =D .
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I’d be interested to see someone with an acquaintance with engineering principles that I lack take a stab at it; but I suspect that it would be tricky to compete with the fact that the extra structural material you do need in a gravity well doesn’t need to be moved out of the gravity well.
Going by what I think are most-current best prices; a metric ton of anything in orbit has a base price of just over $2,700,000. That kind of mark-up on materials will buy you a great deal of extra support structure.
If you’ve got a plan for a synthetic aperture design the size of a convenient orbit or something you might well be getting into territory where terrestrial options just don’t cut it; but short of that you can afford a great deal of brute force in places where shipping costs are low and you can get away with ubiquitous commodity materials.
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Man, I just want a space megastructure already. We’re letting down all the 1960s folks. We were supposed to have colonized the moon by now and have sent at least 2 missions to Jupiter!
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For near-Earth stuff, I’m under the impression one large dish has definite advantages. But in terms of “bang for the buck”…ehh, not so much.
And there’s the rub; it’s just not very plausible to fund such an expensive niche design, unless you’re China and simply decree it as part of the next 10-year Plan ^^’ .
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“Even in this metric age, it was the one-thousand-foot telescope, not the three-hundred-meter one.” - Arthur C Clarke, 2010.
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Though Clarke proposed a 1000km telescope in Imperial Earth.
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Well, if that “Bang” happens to come from a 2 Km diameter asteroid then “Bucks” saved will be worthless. (remember, 2015 TB145, estimated to be 2 km wide, was discovered only weeks from it’s closest approach to Earth, which was inside the Moon’s orbit. Arecibo RADAR was one of the resources used to image it I believe ) …But yeah, it’s day is done, sadly.
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Didn’t the movie adaptation use the very large array?
The Green Bank Telescope says:
Frequently Asked Questions:
Can any NRAO facilities or the Green Bank Telescope replace the Arecibo Telescope?
- While some instruments of the NRAO and GBO can perform some of the Arecibo Telescope’s functions, none will be a total replacement for its capabilities. The Arecibo Telescope is irreplaceable.
Does the NRAO or GBO support the NSF’s move to decommission the telescope?
- We defer to the engineers’ reports evaluating the devastating damage done to the telescope’s infrastructure and threats to staff safety, as shared in the NSF’s release
Will the NRAO or GBO be providing support to the staff displaced by this event?
- We encourage AO staff displaced by this loss to consider any of our current open opportunities with the NRAO or GBO
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