Famed Arecibo Telescope, On the Brink of Collapse, Will Be Dismantled (sciencemag.org) 98
The Arecibo telescope's long and productive life has come to an end. From a report: The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today it will decommission the iconic radio telescope in Puerto Rico following two cable breaks in recent months that have brought the structure to near collapse. The 57-year-old observatory, a survivor of numerous hurricanes and earthquakes, is now in such a fragile state that attempting repairs would put staff and workers in danger. "This decision was not an easy one to make," Sean Jones, NSF's assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences, said at a news briefing today. "We understand how much Arecibo means to [the research] community and to Puerto Rico." 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. But they are under threat if the telescope structure collapses. That would bring the 900-ton instrument platform, suspended 137 meters above the 305-meter-wide dish, crashing down. Flailing cables could damage other buildings on the site, as could the three support towers if they fell, too. "There is a serious risk of an unexpected and uncontrolled collapse," Gaume said. "A controlled decommissioning gives us the opportunity to preserve valuable assets that the observatory has." Over the next few weeks, engineering firms will develop a plan for a controlled dismantling. It may involve releasing the platform from its cables explosively and letting it fall.
It is dangerous right now (Score:2)
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Like the interstate higihway system, yes?
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It didn't have to be this way (Score:1, Flamebait)
If the US had a President more focused on supporting science and handling natural disasters and less focused on childish feuds with Puerto Rico's politicians and spending money on propping up dying fossil fuel industries, things could've been different. RIP world's biggest transmitter and 2nd-biggest single receiver.
Re:It didn't have to be this way (Score:5, Insightful)
It's unfortunate but nature takes its toll.
But the site will still be available so from that perspective it wouldn't be that hard to build a new antenna at that site. In many cases the hardest problem is to find a good location. And a new build would be a good way to actually create jobs, something that's needed in that area.
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Re:It didn't have to be this way (Score:5, Informative)
Place the blame where it lies, on the management that did not establish a comprehensive inspection and repair program early in the life of the instrument.
It HAD a comprehensive inspection and repair program from the very start of its life, and executed over the vast majority of its almost 60 years of existing.
Financial support was only terminated in 2016, when no further maintenance could be performed.
A 2017 hurricane is what caused nearly all of the initial damages that we are now seeing the end results from the lack of maintenance they aren't being given money to perform.
did not establish a comprehensive inspection and repair program early in the life of the instrument.
54 of its first 57 years is in no way possible to call "early in its life", the entire time it was being maintenance.
3 of its last 57 years is the extent it hasn't been maintenanced. Not because of a lack of a plan to do so, but for lack of funding to execute that plan.
Place the blame where it lies, with the people that removed funding from the NSF for performing the very maintenance they have been for 95% of the telescopes life time.
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The major funding cuts for Arecibo happened between 2007 and 2011. There have been supplementary funds coming from different places, but they were all to support programs, not maintenance. The biggest issue is the National Science Foundation itself, which has been diverting funds from serious science to crap like "gender in glaciological research." The $400,000 for that probably could have partly paid for some new cables at Arecibo - and since the total NSF budget is over $8 billion now, it seems they could
Re:It didn't have to be this way (Score:5, Interesting)
You may like making this political, but it isn't. Hard infrastructure like Arecibo is not funded out of the same budget line as programs addressing gender inequality. NSF's decision was to favor building, maintaining, and improving other facilities instead. Even if NSF were given more money for facilities at the expense of other items, they would likely have still dropped Arecibo, since the Green Bank Telescope [wikipedia.org] was also dropped from the portfolio and is far more scientifically productive and so would have been higher priority to retain. Arecibo has been a niche instrument for quite some time, and after an extensive review process was not determined to be worth the continued cost, given a wide array of other facilities, big and small. You are correct that this decision was made a decade or so ago, and is just coming to its inevitable conclusion now.
If Puerto Rico were a state, it is quite possible that its senators would have been able to maintain funding with earmarks or similar maneuvers. But that's the worst of bad politics, so I'm sure you would dislike that too.
Re:It didn't have to be this way (Score:4, Informative)
" The biggest issue is the National Science Foundation itself, which has been diverting funds from serious science to crap like "gender in glaciological research." The $400,000 for that probably could have partly paid for ..."
That grant was for over 7 years work, for over 14 people on over 14 papers, one of which had the word gender in it.
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearc... [nsf.gov]
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"gender in glaciological research."
I had to look this up. Yes, it's true. The NSF founded a study on gender in glaciological research but did not find the funds to maintain the Arecibo telescope.
Re:It didn't have to be this way (Score:5, Interesting)
I see this a lot in the educational sector - it's so much easier for people to get grants to get things, than to get grants to pay for upkeep and maintenance.
It's such a waste, because they get these great things, like new buildings, and then they just fall apart over the next few decades because nobody has a budget for maintenance and updates. Eventually it's so behind and falling apart that the just shrug and go try to find another grant or bond or whatever to completely replace it.
So sad to see that they could have something like new right now, for half what it's going to cost to replace it, and have had the added benefit of having an up-to-date and state-of-the-art facility the entire time, rather than a gradually degrading one that's been less and less useful the last 5-10 yrs.
But it's a waste of time to try to convince them otherwise. It's not entirely their fault though, so much of it comes down to the people funding the grants and bonds etc don't understand, or want their name on a new building rather than a footnote that they're paying to maintain an existing one.
I'd expect a variation on this theme is what's taken Arecibo literally to the brink of collapse. They'll tear it down, then try to drum up funding for a new one. Meanwhile, it'll be down for a decade or so. And of course no one will give a second thought to how they're going to keep the new one maintained and updated for the next 30 yrs. So it'll be falling apart by 2060 and we'll be right back where we are now.
Re:It didn't have to be this way (Score:5, Informative)
No just education, take a look at America's bridges that have taken the worst of the "cut taxes and spend money on wars" mentality that has ruled the US since Ron Reagan lied to us about trickle down.
This is all the result of horrible financial management by American right wing politicians
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and don't forget dams and reservoirs in that list
(at least they're trying to maintain the highways)
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It is why when Andrew Carnegie dispersed his massive fortune if he paid for something like a library he would only give the money for the building and books if the local community would provide a plan for its long term operation.
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The Gates Foundation gets criticized a lot for doing the same thing.
Re:It didn't have to be this way (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just in the US, I see it in UK acadaemia as well. There are millions of pounds for funding shiny new equipment. But funding the ongoing running costs, consumables, maintenance, technical support staff and the like? Not so much. So you end up with huge capital expenditures going to waste or being underutilised, not because there is any fault with the kit, but because there's no dedicated staff to maintain and support it, train people to use it, and pay for the ongoing running costs. I've worked in some places that do a very good job, but in other places there's prestige to be gained by getting the funding to buy the biggest and shiniest toy with all the extra knobs on. But the people who get the funding and do the purchasing are rarely the people who actually have to use the kit, the actual requirements often come second. In many cases, making do with something a quarter of the price would do the job just as well, and be much more affordable when bits need replacing. Hell, buy two up front and still have half the cash left over for consumables and staffing. Unfortunately, funding and budgeting is insane and makes no sense, and many of the people involved aren't even sufficiently competent to run their own household budgets.
Arecibo is a great shame, but I think it's fair to say it's had a good long run, and would have had to be decommissioned at some point. After the damage that's been inflicted and the generally poor state it's in now, it may well be much cheaper to start over than repair it. Assuming there's still a demand for it, hopefully there will be the possibility for a new one to be built again in the future. But you are likely to be completely correct that had it been funded properly, routine maintenance should have prevented the problems from happening in the first place.
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I used to work in facilities management - maintenance - as a sparky, wrench turner, and expert in the use of the plumbers best friend while I was in college. Working on everything from a wall outlet to fans large enough to stand inside them. As Grainger says: one of ones that got it done.
To a politician, university chancellor, doner, etc. A new building, bridge, park, etc. is an edifice to put a plaque on. And on that plaque is someone's (or several folks') name. Give us money, and we'll put your name r
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The reason for this in education is that government has been slowly repopulating by science and engineering dolts. Their reward structure is bullet points on Pooperpoints. It is important for them to have new bullet points every year that sparkle. Infrastructure does not sparkle and hence they have no interest in funding it.
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What has science done for him recently?
The voters who voted him in wanted to "bring in outsider to drain the swamp" - or at least that is what was being claimed - but this looks like a simple abdication of the US's role in the world. It only took four years and he's working on doing as much damage as he can in the next few weeks.
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"Past attempts to bring peace and democracy in the world by the US have been unmitigated disasters" such as the U.S. saving the world in WWII and putting Communism out to pasture.
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Interesting how you bring Communism on the plate. You're aware, right, that one of the strategies to cause the downfall of the Soviet Union involved funding and arming a group of radical islamists that later went on to form Al Qaeda?
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No doubt....
But I guess this is what makes america great... waiting to the last minute to fix things until we can't fix them anymore and just better off to just blow everything away.... :( :( :(
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The engineers have been saying since 2016 that they need the maintenance budget restored, and since 2017 that the hurricane had done serious damage that needed to be repaired immediately.
Re:It didn't have to be this way (Score:5, Informative)
Are you talking about Trump or US presidents in general?
If you are talking about Trump, the budget of Arecibo have been reduced way before Trump took office. Trump didn't help, but he isn't more at fault than his predecessors.
If you are talking about US presidents in general, I think you are overstating the importance of the president. These are the kind of things decided by the congress. The president may say "let's put money here and not there", if the congress disagrees, money will got there and not here. Trump wanted people back on the moon (for his own fame of course), but the congress and other governing bodies said "no" to his plan, so no people on the moon (at least not yet). Of course it works the other way, the president can't cut funding just because he wants to. The US president is not a king, had NASA (or another simillar entity) made it a priority to maintain Arecibo, it would have been maintained, president or not.
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Are you talking about Trump or US presidents in general?
If you are talking about Trump, the budget of Arecibo have been reduced way before Trump took office. Trump didn't help, but he isn't more at fault than his predecessors.
Perhaps technically true, but continuing to leave Arecibo hanging by a thread in the midst of a natural disaster he intentionally neglected is a bit worse than staying the course - an admittedly bad course which he could've corrected and didn't.
Re: It didn't have to be this way (Score:5, Interesting)
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It isn't just the alleged president who is not focused on supporting science or protecting from natural disasters. The R's following that ignorant git are just as responsible. The U.S. will slowly sink into obscurity due to a significant majority of the pop. unwilling to fund science. They'll be happy just consuming whatever whizzies industry throws at them until that industry is controlled by foreign companies and governments who are not so short-sighted. And then they'll blame their usual hobgobblins for
This is heartbreaking (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked on a project for a colleague at Arecibo back in the 1990s. If you look closely at the beginning of the movie "Species", you can see our antenna hanging from the catwalk to the triangle.
Walking under the reflector seemed like being on a space station: the ground and the ceiling curved together (like they would on something rotating to simulate gravity), the light was dim (only some sun could get through the mesh), and the ground was covered in ferns (perhaps oxygen generating on a space station). The grad students working there told stories of having sex underneath the dish.
Arecibo Observatory is an amazing place with amazing people and I am heartbroken to see it shut down.
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The grad students working there told stories of having sex underneath the dish.
Well, that figures with what I thought was the problem here . . . the folks tasked with taking care of it were fucking around instead.
I would have thought that a system like this would have been running 24/7, with no time for college hanky-panky in the way of observations.
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"liver there"
Clearly they have nothing on the daft cunt infestation in your cellar.
People like you make me wish internet access required an IQ test.
Re: This is heartbreaking (Score:2)
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A long time coming (Score:5, Funny)
Bond and Trevelyan basically trashed the whole thing back in 95 so we all really should have seen this coming...
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Keeping it submerged except for the occasional orbital weapon firing probably didn't help either.
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if that wasn't enough then there was the alien singularity bomb in 1996
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
57 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Too much RFI in Arizona (Score:2)
The area around the Arizona crater is too noisy to do observation.
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There are already telescopes that work exactly like this. There's an upper limit to how big they can be though because of fluid dynamics and the need to keep the mercury uncontaminated (you basically have to run it in a clean room that encases the whole pool of mercury). You could not realistically build something giant like you describe. Just the amount of mercury required would basically create the world's largest biohazard and cost many billions.
In either case this only makes sense for frequencies at ver
Except for you know, money (Score:1)
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Easier to get a grant/investment in "new, big, shiny, more relevant", vs "old, restored, stretching useful life, still same set of instruments", maybe?
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I'm sure the US Exceptionalists— often the same people that fight public funding of anything tooth and nail— won't draw the connection between de-funding science and our impending worldwide irrelevance in scientific matters. Probably blame immigrants like they usually do.
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It's doubly funny because China recently opened their own, larger Arecibo clone.
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That is how it will be exploited and your post should not have been downmodded.
Most readers only see "big broken dish" and have NFI about what that really means in terms of data. They see something old and famous, end of story.
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Dated technology (Score:2)
Interferometry in radio has come a long way since then and we're able to substitute separate arrays of smaller apertures for a single massive one and get better resolution, not to mention point and track control. Not quite there in optical, though segmenting mirrors might be considered a small step.
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Forgeting that it is also one of the very few so powerfull space/atmospheric radars.
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Interferometry in radio has come a long way since then and we're able to substitute separate arrays of smaller apertures for a single massive one and get better resolution, not to mention point and track control.
Synthetic apertures are not a direct substitute for real apertures.
While they can provide excellent angular resolution, their sensitivity doesn't scale with the size of the synthetic aperture.
They're mostly good for looking at very strong signals- so if that's what you're doing, then a synthetic aperture is going to get you far better angular resolution per dollar; but if you are, for example, trying to pick up very weak radio signals from a target star, a big telescope is going to perform better.
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Would a multi-dish single-receiver radio telescope make sense? Or a hybrid, where all the dishes reflect to a "wall" of individual receivers for interferometry ... but then can also focus on a single one for low noise detection.
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FFS. It is pathetic that they let it come to this. (Score:2)
And where are the tech billionaires' dollars ?
Re:FFS. It is pathetic that they let it come to th (Score:5, Funny)
After the observatory detected an alien signal, all the money got poured into making The Machine. Well actually two of them. After that was over, the money kind of dried up I guess.
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Oh that wasn't at Arecibo but rather at the VLA.
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You're not making good Contact.
RIP Seti@Home? (Score:2)
Not that I've thought of this for ages, but I used to run the Seti@Home screensaver on my home computer in the late 90s. Actually, most of my family did. It looks like they use another data source aside from the Arecibo now, so I guess it's not RIP but it just kind of takes me back to the good old days of internet-connected computing...
Re:RIP Seti@Home? (Score:5, Informative)
Your post is worthy of a Slashdot story (Score:3)
Your post is worthy of a Slashdot story on its own and I encourage posting it as such with more details to fill it out.
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Sad day (Score:5, Interesting)
I was sentimentally attached to this observatory. It could send signals as far as the asteroid belt and get an usable echo in return. Powerful radar.
I know that interferometry already allow for fantastic radio images so radioastronomy is far from dead.
I would also thank the people who posted informative stuff in this thread. I appreciated what i just learned here. :)
Versus... (Score:2)
"There is a serious risk of an unexpected and uncontrolled collapse," Gaume said."
What are risks of an expected but uncontrolled collapse? Or an unexpected but controlled collapse?
Anyway, here's Wonderwall (Score:2)
It feels like the 1970s now.
57 years is a pretty good service life. (Score:2)
I just looked up the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank. A real biggie in its day. First operated in 1957, and still being used now, as far as I know. I imagine it needs a lick of paint on a regular basis, like a bridge.
When was Arecibo last in active service? Are its capabilities still required? I think dismantling the existing suspended antenna would be a good idea, if the structure is beyond repair. This would avoid needless damage to the dish. Perhaps a new antenna can be erected when funds permit.
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I just looked up the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank. A real biggie in its day. First operated in 1957, and still being used now, as far as I know. I imagine it needs a lick of paint on a regular basis, like a bridge.
Feh, silly British bridges might need paint. Superior American bridges clearly do not need paint, just look at them!
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Helicopter (Score:2)
I has a stupid idea: why not have an helicopter lift it. A quick search shows that biggest helicopters can lift 22 tons. The thing is 900 tons. That will not do it
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Corrosion is setting in. It needs to be replaced and not just rebuilt. OTOH, the scrap pieces could be auctioned off as memorabilia with the proceeds going towards funding the construction for a new one. Just a thought.
Thorougly botched (Score:1)
This was thoroughly botched to an extent that smells worse than an accident. The first cable snapped because of new, excessive from an "upgrade". If addressed promptly, no issue. But instead it was addressed like Trump address throwing the paper towels. I suspect the Trump administration place a specific, formative part in this tragedy. Hmm, is the telescope getting dismantled in a hurry before Biden gets in or what? Don't mind me, I just want to know.
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This was thoroughly botched to an extent that smells worse than an accident. The first cable snapped because of new, excessive load from an "upgrade". If addressed promptly, no issue. But instead that was addressed much like Trump addressed throwing the paper towels. I suspect the Trump administration played a specific, formative role in this tragedy. Hmm, is the telescope getting dismantled in a hurry before Biden gets in or what? Don't mind me, I just want to know.
There, fixed some typos. Slashdot! This sucks too much. You know why I went (mostly) to Reddit? Because I can edit my posts. WTF is up with Slashdot, you guys can't code or what?
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You know why I went (mostly) to Reddit?
I want to know why you don't stay there. Is there a particular reason you feel the need to inflict your crazy ranting on us here?
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And your crazy ranting somehow doesn't smell like shit? Feh. Some people.
Unfortunately (Score:2)
We'll be making Pop Culture's stupid people famous and wealthy while we dissolve into goo. Gotta Go, The Masked Singer is on tonight, the The Bachelorette. It don't get no better than that must see TV.
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China's is not an alternative. AFAIK China's is only a receive dish. Arecibo could transmit/receive, either to be used as radar, or potentially communicating as part of the deep space network. Arecibo was originally made to be a radar during the cold war.
I think it doesn't aim either. But with the apparent demise of Arecibo, we don't have much else.
fucking idiots (Score:2)
For the price of dismantling it, we COULD have replaced cables sometime ago.
Fond memories (Score:1)
When we stopped over in Puerto Rico on our trip to another Caribbean island, first idea my girlfriend had was to have a look at Arecibo telescope.
One of the reasons she's now my wife.