Arecibo Radio Telescope collapses due to lack of maintenance...

[Ace-Garageguy]

Witness the symbolic beginning of the collapse of Western Civilization.

7 billion people on the planet, some of them individually worth billions of $$, yet nobody cared enough to maintain this incredible instrument.

The Idiocracy is here...

 

[iamsuperdan]

Read about this a couple of days ago. 

And most people still have never heard about this, nor would they care.

 

[Rob Hall]

Sad..I remember Arecibo from the mid 90s, one of the projects I worked on at the U. of Michigan in grad school involved software for processing satellite data from there and from satellites in Greenland, to support scientists studying space weather. 

[Dave Van]

In NOV 1988 the a moveable 300 ft telescope collapsed at the Green Bank WV facility. This was due to rust that was not taken care of.  So it seems like a problem that is not a unknown issue. It was replaced with a larger telescope that is now the largest in the world moveable unit.  While the loss of Arecibo is bad being built into the earth made it limited. The current 328 foot dish at Green Bank is not used full time and is actually looking for work!!! So it seems like the loss will not cripple reasearch overall. 

 

Current dish......I live not far away and have toured the facility a number of time. All vehicles used on site are Checker Marathon diesels!!! 

Edited December 9, 2020 by Dave Van

[cobraman]

What a shame.

[espo]

Just saving a dime so they can spend a dollar.  

[1930fordpickup]

This is the don't fix it until it is broken mentality.  Because replacing those 2 cables might affect the bonus of those in charge.  Now they may get a bonus because they saved demolition money. 

[stavanzer]

Ace is correct. The Idiocracy is here. Delayed Maintenance, Arguments about who-pays-for-what, and other Office Shenanigans.  All of it by folks who most likely could not spell "Radio Telescope" much less understand what it did. BUT, they did get to be in charge of all those Pointy Headed, Double Domes, and get them to to grovel at their feet so Midwits could feel better. Thus does Civilization die. The Poet T.S. Eliot was right. "Not with a Bang, but a Whimper"

Edited December 10, 2020 by alexis

[iamsuperdan]

Really though, I guess we don't need it anymore, considering that we already know about the Galactic Federation and their Mars bases. 

https://globalnews.ca/news/7508152/aliens-galactic-federation-israel-trump/

 

Too bad they won't let us join. Seems they're smarter than us anyway.

Quote

There is allegedly a Galactic Federation of alien species among the stars — and they don’t want humans to be part of their club.

A former head of Israel‘s military space program claims that extraterrestrials have made contact with officials in the United States and Israel over the years, but the aliens won’t come out in public because they worry people will freak out.

In other words, they’ve done their homework.

 

 

[peteski]

I recall seeing the Arecibo radio telescope used in some move (don't remember which one).  Could have been a TV series. It was very impressive looking!  Too bad it was neglected.

Isn't this type of equipment supported by volunteers, and financed by donations and/or government grants?  It is not like these are for-profit ventures. As such, generating funds for the upkeep is probably difficult.  It is at the mercy of politicians or donors.

Edited December 10, 2020 by peteski

[slusher]

If it was worth building, should have been worth maintaining....

[Ace-Garageguy]

15 minutes ago, slusher said:

If it was worth building, should have been worth maintaining....

Excellent point.

And though there are other somewhat similar instruments, none of them are capable of what Arecibo could do.

[Painted Black]

James Bond....Goldeneye.

[iamsuperdan]

11 hours ago, peteski said:

I recall seeing the Arecibo radio telescope used in some move (don't remember which one).  Could have been a TV series. It was very impressive looking!  Too bad it was neglected.

 

It was featured in an episode of The X Files around 94-95. Mulder and Scully went to Arecibo to investigate reports that it was secretly receiving transmissions from an extraterrestrial source.

[Lunajammer]

12 hours ago, peteski said:

I recall seeing the Arecibo radio telescope used in some move (don't remember which one). 

"Contact"

 

 

[Lunajammer]

57 years exposed to the elements in an earthquake and hurricane prone area seems like a pretty good run.

[Dragline]

I beg to differ about when the beginning of the end started, but OK I'll play.

 

A sad thing to see since I did research on it several years ago prompted by a Youtube video I watched. And incredible instrument of untold value to humanity just gone like that with a thud.

Nothing in the mainstream. No surprises there.

[Ace-Garageguy]

54 minutes ago, Dragline said:

I beg to differ about when the beginning of the end started, but OK I'll play...

Yeah, it's been going down the tubes for a while, but your basic normie has been looking the other way, or is afflicted with terminal HITS (head-in-the-sand) syndrome.

This is a pretty dramatic...and tragic... proof that those of us who've been paying attention have been seeing the reality of the situation.

Funny that Arecibo falls under MY definition of "technology", as opposed to what is meant by the majority today...and as you say, the mainstream media didn't even notice.

Mr. Gates or Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Bezos, "technology" kings all, could have easily paid to maintain or repair the thing when it would have been prudent, and would have never even missed the money...chump change to those guys.

[Dragline]

3 minutes ago, Ace-Garageguy said:

 "but your basic normie has been looking the other way, or is afflicted with terminal HITS (head-in-the-sand) syndrome."

I've heard it called TDS instead of HITS syndrome. I learn something new daily.

 

 

Edited December 10, 2020 by Dragline

[Lunajammer]

23 hours ago, Ace-Garageguy said:

Mr. Gates or Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Bezos, "technology" kings all,

This falls squarely in the domain of Elon Musk or what's the fundamental point of SpaceX, and don't say money because I don't believe billionaire bucks has ever been his sole motivation.

Edited December 11, 2020 by Lunajammer

[Dave Van]

There are lots of things I'd lay at the feet of Gates and his TECH buddies.....but not the telescope failure.....

[Ace-Garageguy]

40 minutes ago, Lunajammer said:

This falls squarely in the domain of Elon Musk or what's the fundamental point of SpaceX, and don't say money because I don't believe billionaire bucks has ever been his sole motivation.

Yeah...much as I like a lot of what Musk has been doing, I'm disappointed he didn't step up to at least try to get Arecibo patched enough to survive. 

But I've read elsewhere that the NSF has an 8.3-BILLION dollar annual budget. One would think that a smart guy could squeeze enough bucks out of that to provide absolutely required maintenance.

A report on the planned decommissioning of the facility stated a while back that "following a review of engineering assessments that found damage to the Arecibo Observatory cannot be stabilized without risk to construction workers and staff at the facility..."   

Kinda makes one wonder why those Neanderthals and idiot boomers 57 years back could BUILD it, but there's nobody around anymore who could FIX it...especially now that the entire world is populated by nothing but tech-savvy wizards.

I guess if something can't be done with a screen and a keyboard, it's impossible.

Edited December 11, 2020 by Ace-Garageguy

[Dave Ambrose]

Arecibo is both an amazing, and problematic facility. It was designed for an era when our equipment to receive and process the signals was 1000 times less effective than it is now. So, you had to compensate with a lot of collecting area. It certainly has a vast collector. Unfortunately, it isn't steerable, so the effective collecting area falls off significantly when you're not looking directly overhead. The object you want to look at will rarely, if ever, be overhead. 

Given the sensitivity and low noise of modern head-end electronics, there isn't the great need for so much collecting area. If you need more sensitivity, you can get that, plus better spatial resolution, by combining signals from multiple antennas. We didn't have that kind of signal processing capability when Arecibo was built. Now we've implemented processing capabilities that weren't even theoretically possible when the dish was built. Dr. Bouman's work imaging a black hole would be a good example. 

Its unique capability was for radar astronomy. That will be hard to replace. Theoretically, you can use a multiple antenna setup as you would for receiving, but you'd need to do something unprecedented with the transmitters. The military-industrial complex tried to do something similar for the "Star Wars" initiative, and failed pretty miserably. So, that capability is gone. 

The telescope needed its supporting cables refitted. Those cables are under horrendous tension. That's why there are six of them. Two cables had already failed, and the rest were in overload conditions. The ends of the cables were cast into place in the towers with molten zinc. They weren't designed for replacement. We wouldn't do it that way now, but that was the best they could do in 1963. I haven't heard about the condition of the columns, but I can't imagine that they were in great condition either. I can't imagine how you might retrofit them safely without removing a large piece of the reflecting surface. 

Arecibo got to where it is over time, and mostly behind the scenes. I don't like how it turned out, but given the condition it was in, decommissioning was probably the wisest choice. 

[peteski]

Wow Dave, thanks for that explanation.

That sheds another celestial light on this subject.  I'm curious: what do you do for a daytime job, or are you just a big fan of radio-telescopes?

[Ace-Garageguy]

10 hours ago, Dave Ambrose said:

 ...Its unique capability was for radar astronomy. That will be hard to replace. Theoretically, you can use a multiple antenna setup as you would for receiving, but you'd need to do something unprecedented with the transmitters. The military-industrial complex tried to do something similar for the "Star Wars" initiative, and failed pretty miserably. So, that capability is gone.    Exactly.

...The telescope needed its supporting cables refitted. Those cables are under horrendous tension. That's why there are six of them. Two cables had already failed, and the rest were in overload conditions. The ends of the cables were cast into place in the towers with molten zinc. They weren't designed for replacement. We wouldn't do it that way now, but that was the best they could do in 1963...   The deterioration of anything exposed to the elements is entirely a function of the efficacy of the maintenance it receives. Had the facility been properly maintained with an intelligently applied ongoing program, something similar to what suspension bridges get (we hope), the problems leading to the collapse would have never even got started.