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Arecibo Radio Observatory will soon be demolished rather than repaired.
Why, you might ask?
Because the existing cables are showing signs of failure at far below their rated strengths.
They have not said why yet, but one suspects shoddy workmanship from back when it was first made.
If that's so, then it's only the insanely conservative specifications and planned in expansion that allowed to to stay standing for so long.
I am sad to see such an important instrument go.
I would gladly support rebuilding it.
Besides the piss-poor cables that are failing more and more, overall the lack of maintenance since the mid 90's as The Party of Science kept cutting the science budget is what has killed Arecibo.
ReplyDeleteThe individual panels are rotten and thrashed. The support columns are rusting away and thrashed. The whole facility looks like a USN ship at the end of Barky's reign as King of America.
And it's the same thing that has killed so many Navy ships. Increased use, lack of repairs, lack of upgrades, no money for anything.
At least when it failed, it didn't kill anyone.
I support tearing it down and rebuilding it better and if possible bigger. Build a new one with higher tolerances.
Years of complete neglect and corrupt builders from the beginning have killed the West's only really big antenna.
Now we have to rely on the ChiComs for that type of research... Yeah.... No.....
Gee, Mr. Gates and Mr. Bezos, why don't you just get together and pay for a new one?
Bill Gates in particular is an embarrassment when it comes to his "philanthropy". He does a few grandiose things that are largely for show, but when you consider the amount compared to his net worth, he's way behind a lot of mean old reprehensible conservatives and Republicans, and below what a lot of people of much more modest means. His buddy Warren Buffet is just about as bad. Those stupidly wealthy people who complain they aren't paying enough in taxes... Well, nothing stopping them from opening up their pocketbooks and really "making a difference" except the fact that almost all of the liberal rich are massive hypocrites. I'll readily admit I'm a scrooge like bastard, but I don't claim otherwise or make a big show when I do something.
DeleteIt would be great if those wealthy tech execs actually walked what they talk.
I think the cost/benefit of fixing it isn't good enough. Arecibo is a big dish, but it's not really steerable because of how it's built. It's a screen suspended in a bowl-shaped valley. Yeah they can move the feed so that it's not just sweeping out the same spot as the earth rotates, but the angles still aren't good compared to a steerable dish.
ReplyDeleteThe field of radio astronomy has moved to big arrays of smaller, more steerable telescopes combined in software into a giant synthetic aperture. Think the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Like everything else, there are design trades; better at some things worse at others, but for the vast majority of what they're trying to do, aperture is king.
It's the loss of the radar astronomy capability that hurts.
DeleteThe big arrays are passive radio only.