Wimps. Something like that is worth risking a few lives for.
Where were you?
The opposite side of the planet. And I wasn't informed that it needed attention. If I had the skills and could get there I would have chipped in.
Yes this a great shame. Two severe storms have caused it, and on inspection, it seems that many orf the supports for the cables which hold the dish up are considered unsafe, and in need of complete replacement. Seems to me that nobody has been looking after the maintenance work out of sight and now the crunch has come. Thing is though in the local area it is a good employer of people, it is also one of a kind and is needed by science. The eye watering sum to even get it operational never mind repair the other faults is compounded by the danger in the work site, which is reckoned to be quite large, since some bits are at the point of catastrophic failure. The scandal is who took their eye off this ball and failed to invest in its future? Now they advise closing it completely, but that big Sinc hole seems almost custom made for such a use. Is it maybe cheaper to start afresh now? Brian
China has a nice one....five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope.
We are talking Puerto Rico.
It may be that technology has passed that scope. There have been ways found to connect smaller scopes over the world to give the effect of one very large scope.
Up to a point. Multiple arrays gave resolution. Giant dishes like Arecibo gave sensitivity. It's area was equivalent to 400 15m dishes; or 16 Lovell (Joderell Bank) telescopes.
Isn't Arecibo radio only? Aren't we moving towards other sources like gamma, gravity etc?
It was used worldwide.
On Dec 9, 2020 at 6:17:02 PM MST, "Bob F" wrote <rqrsu7$ij9$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
Whatever the reason it is a shame it was lost.
It was used worldwide but if the maintenance was left to the PR's it would be FUBAR. I'm all in favor of Puerto Rican independence. As long as it's hanging in its current status some assholes will try to make it a state.
Towards *also* using other sources. Since there's useful data coming in on radio frequencies, it would be silly to ignore it.
#Paul
Apparently it was in the process of being decommissioned, suggesting it wasn't being used much anyway. It's been 'hanging by a thread' for at least a month.
But these days they have big arrays of many radio telescopes working in synchronisation that probably have a much wider theoretical aperture and much better resolution. Arecibo was of its day; good while it lasted.
I was told that the resolution may be higher, but not the sensitivity. Don't ask me to explain those terms, I'm just repeating it.
The resolution will clearly be dependent on the effective size. Sensitivity will depend on the total collecting area of the elements.
A 50 Mpx camera that only works in bright sunlight?
I don't really understand this. About 2 weeks before the "collapse" I heard that it was being de-commissioned because of funding, etc. Then everyone reports that it suddenly collapses. The pics look like, as someone suggested, that there were some small explosives breaking the cables. A good news story? ... a conspiracy theory? ... fake news?
The history seems to be that first a main cable broke. A plan to repair it, subject to acquiring funding, was being considered when another cable broke. The engineering assessment was that it was now unsafe to work on as the other cables might have deteriorated too much. Presumably it was decommissioned by simultaneously breaking all the remaining cables (?with explosives) so at least they knew where it would fall. Where funding comes in is that, with hindsight, a bit of preventive inspection and maintenance on the cables, as is done with suspension bridges, would have been good if they had had the funding to do it.
I spent some time in PR in 1975 working with the phone system. routine maintenence was non-existing. I suspect it was the same for Arecibo.
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