I am glad that I got to visit the place when I did in the mid 90's. All of the hams that worked there were very welcoming and showed me their club station. It's sad to see that the place went into such disrepair. I guess that the Hubble has taken up a lot of the work, too. I remember seeing a sign that said the observatory was part of Columbia University or was it NYU. I can only hope that they rejuvenate the site with new state of the art equipment and continue their quest. The dish can be replaced with newer and lighter materials, and a program put in place for routine maintenance. I hope this comes to pass.
For everyone saying the facility was "old", please cite to me where radio waves reflect better from new metal. The equipment on the platform has been upgraded every few years. The facility is basically as sensitive as a brand new one would be. Today's world is about taking photos of yourself and your food and pretty much idiocracy. No technological or scientific interests. One of these days, aliens are going to show up after receiving the Arecibo message and when they get here, they will say the alien equivalent of "wtf??"
NUTS! The antenna was rendered obsolete by several serious advances, including the Hubble telescope in orbit. It shows how much ignorance and hate is in circulation to try to tell us it is part of "decline" of this nation.
who would have thought something as important as this site would ever be torn down? it played such a important part of dep space radio exploration!
Breaking News--Friends of Arecibo Radio Telescope have determined that the damaged NSF is in imminent danger of unpredictable collapse with threat to life and surrounding structures and institutions. Efforts currently underway to defund existing NSF programs due to politicizing of hard science and research and the resultant blatant neglect of infrastructure and maintenance at various facilities nationwide for decades. Planning underway to disassemble and demolish what remains of the NSF.
Huh? Hubble is an optical telescope. Arecibo is a radio telescope. They don't collect the same information. Back to high school science class for you!
Beat me to it. One is a wrench, the other is a screwdriver. Both are VERY important - but they are NOT the same tools Dave W7UUU
Large aperture is never ever 'obsolete'. The collecting area is essential to detecting extremely weak cosmic 'noise', and rapidly transient emissions. Optical emissions are usually produced by different phenomena than radio ones, and tell a differ chapter in the story of 'what goes on'. Hubble hardly , in any way, duplicates Arecibo.
I crunched a few work units too. Had a Proliant 1200 server running 24/7 handing out work units to 7 desktop PCs at the house for a few years.
AO was, for many decades, administered by Cornell University. It is now administered by a consortium headed by University of Central Florida. The electronics were state of the art. The mechanical infrastructure (at least some of it)was updated many times over almost 60 years. The problem is that certain fundamnetal mechanicals were not readily replaceable, and the MTBF for cables and towers were not taken with the prudence that deemed replacing. Not AO staff's fault.
I assume that is not motivated by my prior post(to this one above), nor any of the ones I posted here. Just for info, GBO stands for Green Bank Observatory. Not a government entity. Formerly NRAO Green Bank.
Looks like it's been near death for a while now. See this article from 2017 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/hurricane-damage-threatens-arecibo-observatory-s-future
AO was restored to a considerable degree of capability at radio astronomical and radar astronomical modes in 2018. A great testament to the AO staff.
Radio waves reflect in more useful directions if the metal is in the dish, not on the ground. The "old" has more to do with the structure, than the reflection of radio waves. It would be of some interest to me, as someone who was involved in science of fatigue, fracture, corrosion, to know what, if any maintenance and inspection was done over the years.
Decoded message from SETI: "Stop pointing the radar at us! You humans are just jealous you cannot keep up!"
