Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico Collapses as Engineers Feared (theverge.com) 216
weiserfireman writes: The worst fears of engineers has happened. The massive Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico collapsed in on itself overnight. The catastrophic failure had been predicted by engineers after the telescope suffered two major cable malfunctions over the last couple of months, risking the integrity of the observatory's entire structure. Pictures of Arecibo surfaced online this morning, revealing that the massive 900-ton platform that is normally suspended above the observatory was no longer there. The National Science Foundation, which oversees Arecibo, confirmed to The Verge that the platform did come crashing down onto the telescope's giant 1,000-foot-wide dish. No injuries have been reported, according to the agency. "NSF is working with stakeholders to assess the situation," the agency tweeted. "Our top priority is maintaining safety. NSF will release more details when they are confirmed."
A sad day (Score:5, Insightful)
A sad day for humanity. An icon to science is gone.
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Informative)
A sad day for humanity. An icon to science is gone.
I guess we'll all just have to rely on the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope [wikipedia.org] in China for our science icons ...
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Informative)
It can't light up remote objects though. The special capability of Arecibo was a form of flash photography, it could light up astroids and then take pictures of them.
Dinos regretted same error? [Re:A sad day] (Score:5, Interesting)
Example radar image of an asteroid [naic.edu]. I doubt optical scopes can get comparable images at that distance.
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No we won't, it's geometry is sufficiently different that it effectively is used for "different science". The Wikipedia article itself even compares the two.
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Re:A sad day (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not sure why they dont just use the failure as an excuse to upgrade it?
Because the USA no longer values spending tax dollars on scientific research the way it did sixty years ago.
Re: A sad day (Score:3, Informative)
Because it had a 900 ton sword of Damacles (sp) hanging over the reflector, making working on it impossible.
Now that 'the hammer' has fallen, there's a great big hole in it.
There's literally nothing to build upon, except the canyon, and step one is removing all the debris.
This is worse than starting over with nothing, given the massive demolition work required (crane debris out of canyon? Helicopter?) - the mind reels at the costs involved.
But yeah, "science".
Or a great opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
Fixing the telescope as it was will be very expensive.
But, there are decades of new knowledge that can be taken advantage of that were too costly to plaster over the old design and would have taken away too much observation time to be allowed. That's gone now.
Surely, something less than a "900 ton" electronics package can be built now. Legacy antennas that were damaged years ago aren't in the way of a new design.
And it would probably cost less than the pre-collapse repairs were estimated to be.
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Surely, something less than a "900 ton" electronics package can be built now.
I don't really think this is true. For better or worse, a lot of this technology hasn't changed in decades, and is unlikely to ever do so. To get the low noise required for it to work, we're talking cryogenically cooled receive amplifiers, MASERs and so forth. The technology is mature, stable, and heavy.
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There are new technology developments. GaN is changing RF big time, and now more compact RF transmitters are possible. The receiver was not that heavy, but it will be helped it by GaN, but it was the radar transmitter that was the heavy part.
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Right, a lot of it is just physics. When you're looking for something tiny, your receiver needs to be huge. It should also be mentioned that the platform moves - it's motorized. (I understand it's an alternative to moving the entire dish.) There's a shitton of structural steel. It's not a bunch of Commodore 64s they have sitting up there.
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The dish itself actually depended on spherical aberration in order to allow it to aim at the sky that it could see. As such, the effective size of the dish (in terms of signal efficiency) is lower, but it could then be "aimed" by moving the receiver around in the focal area.
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There was a lot of problems with it. It was very dangerous to try to fix it. There is another similar telescope in China, FAST, but that one has a wimpy radar. On the other hand, with new GaN based RF transmitters, they can probably put a high power radar transmitter on it.
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Solar and battery tech have also taken off in recent years and government is no longer t
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but where should the gov. be focusing its investments now?
The government should focus on basic research that the private sector will not pursue.
Arecibo had outlived its usefulness. Whether a replacement should be built depends on the cost, but also on what open questions still exist in radio astronomy. If a replacement is built, it will likely be an international collaboration.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Informative)
Arecibo had outlived its usefulness.
The scientists actively using it when it had the first structural failure would disagree, as would the scientists which pointed out that Arecibo due to its different geometry than FAST has no competing alternative anywhere in the world.
It most definitely had not outlived its usefulness. It was more than just some tourist attraction / movie set piece.
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The more powerful and advanced the economy, the less government should be needed. Yet it inhales productivity gains so pols can buy re-election.
This can be understood better by noting people will vote for ever larger "bread and circuses", to use that phrase. The memetic cover stories evolve to sound good (e.g. "universal basic income") but that's what's going on, and cannot be dreamt of until the productivity reaches a certain size.
That's the productivity of a free(ish) economy often squatted on by those
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Because the USA no longer values spending tax dollars on scientific research the way it did sixty years ago.
Well, sixty years ago was the start of the space race. If you take all that money out of the equation, the US looks like it's spending almost as much as it did 60 years ago [aaas.org] (non-defense R&D, as a percent of total budget).
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Re:A sad day (Score:5, Interesting)
Why was there a spike in the 60's? Because the funding of science had a geopolitical component; all the rockets developed could be used as ICBMs, and all the scientific discoveries made by Americans and "given to the world" proved the superiority of American capitalism over the Soviet system.
Science is rarely funded just for the sake of pure science, and if it is it's in the margins of budgets. Science gets funded when it serves a national interest.
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Science gets funded when it serves a national interest.
Well, Science serves a huge national interest right now - but probably not astronomy, so much, let-alone radioastronomy.
I mean... the two imminent problems to tackle are Climate change and COVID, and astronomy / astronomic observations would not seem to have much to offer there - unless we're in a space race, etc.
Yes but will spend it in a different way (Score:2)
I am not sure why they dont just use the failure as an excuse to upgrade it?
Because the USA no longer values spending tax dollars on scientific research the way it did sixty years ago.
Yes but they may spend tax dollars in a different way. For example build the radio telescope on the far side of the moon. The astronomers no longer need to be at the telescope sight. Consider Hawaii. The astronomers no longer need to be at the 13,000+ foot Mauna Kea Observatories. They can do their work from a sea level office near the beach.
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Interesting)
They did that for Hubble when it was out of focus
NASA was looking for a high-profile mission to justify the shuttle program's existence back then. Fixing Hubble was a brilliant PR stunt, but a complete waste of money.
Also, a minor reason for fixing it was that the US needed to show it could fix things as easily as it fucked them up.
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Allegedly the other reason was that certain Earth facing spy satellites (Key Hole) were the origin of the Hubble design, and the NRO and other organizations wanted to test repairing their assets.
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They did that for Hubble when it was out of focus
NASA was looking for a high-profile mission to justify the shuttle program's existence back then. Fixing Hubble was a brilliant PR stunt, but a complete waste of money.
Also, a minor reason for fixing it was that the US needed to show it could fix things as easily as it fucked them up.
Plus, they already had the part (Upgraded Optics package) "in stock"; so it was just a matter of Logistics to get it there.
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Why was it a waste of money?
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Why was it a waste of money?
Because it cost far more money to launch a manned shuttle mission than to build and launch a new telescope.
You didn't see the National Reconnaissance Office try to repair its big spy satellites, which were essentially the same size and capability as the Hubble, but pointed downwards. Instead, they cranked them out like popcorn and replaced them as needed.
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The irony, of course, is that the whole reason for designing the shuttle in the way that they did was so that the U.S. government could recover and repair spy satellites, and thus the reason that shuttle launches were so expensive was so that it could do precisely what was too expensive to be worth doing.
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The telescopes could have been launched on something like a Titan IIIC for a fraction of the Shuttle launch cost, just as the big spy satellites were.
You'd also plan ahead and build several hubble-class telescopes in advance, each additional one a small fraction of the cost of the first. They could be incrementally tweaked on the ground based on experience with the earlier launched ones.
At the end of the day, for a lower cost than the single shuttle-launched and repeatedly repaired telescope, you would have
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$1.5 billion for the *first* hubble. If serially produced, subsequent copies would have been a fraction of that.
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No matter what, making the nth mirror on with the same equipment is going to be much cheaper than throwing that equipment out after making one mirror. The same goes for every single other aspect of the design.
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NASA was looking for a high-profile mission to justify the shuttle program's existence back then. Fixing Hubble was a brilliant PR stunt, but a complete waste of money.
No, the Hubble went on to produce years of incredible results. It is still in use.
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The failure was of the cable system holding up the last upgrade.
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Poster child case study for lording over ourselves at the expense of keeping the trade routes open: it took longer to get approval to dredge a South Carolina harbor 5 feet deeper to handle "Superpanamax" ships from a Panama Canal expansion than it did to build the original Panama Canal well over 100 years ago, with its fabled problems.
As you like it? As you vote for it ? Enjoy your collapsing empire, while politicians prognosticate the US not being the big man anymore, pig ignorant they are the cause.
imgur servers, when the giraffe is sick (Score:2)
Ba Dum Tsss! (Score:2)
... Too soon?!
...as Engineers Feared (Score:2)
Yay for engineering! Well, at least some of the time...
heartbreaking... (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Out of curiosity, why couldn't they slowly lower it with the remaining cables when the first one failed?
No money. They didn't have the cash to maintain the thing, they certainly didn't have the money to decommission it in a controlled way.
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I don't see the pic you link (removed?). But what strikes me is the the wikipedia page is what, about 2Kb long after 50 years of breakthroughs ? While every pokemon character has its own 100Kb page... Fuck that and fuck the politicians would go out of their way to deny an ounce of money to science projects.
Pokemon (video game series): 234KB (main page only - I can't count how many other pages are devoted to Pokemon).
Arecibo Observatory: 41.6KB
Wikipedia: the encyclopedia for people who don't know what an encyclopedia is.
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It reflects the number of people capable of contributing to the page. The average 10 year old can extend a Pokemon article... not so much a radio telescope article. This is not a reason to give up on the human race. It's just a reflection of how specialized this topic is.
Re:heartbreaking... (Score:4)
If you look at the page history, someone has split the page. There was only a page for "Arecibo Observatory", and some Mike Peel made an "Arecibo Telescope" page (which was previously a redirect). The photo is on the new page, like most of the previous page.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Corrected link (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(Quite correctly, there was a page about the telescope, and one about the observatory -- the original link was to the observatory and not the telescope, and the collapse is now documented in the telescope page.)
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This is the correct image link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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interesting contrast (Score:4)
And here is a MAJOR accomplishment from the 60s of America collapsing, while CONgress continues to fight JUST FOR SUPPORT FOR AMERICANS.
How can America help others, when we are not even able to help ourselves?
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There are all sorts of contrasts around priorities. This one is relative recent:
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Off... [navy.mil]
An oopsy fire destroyed a multi-billion dollar warship at dock. To fix would cost $3 billion, whilst the newer version of the amphibious assault ship is around $4.5 billion. Wish the US could figure out a way to provide for national defense without going broke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It feels a little bit like China is doing to the US now, what the US did to USSR during the cold war
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China just put their 3rd lander on the moon, ...
Welcome to 1967.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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America has been busy destroying ourselves since the 80s. It is time for us to reverse this, and go back to what we were in the 60s/70s.
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News from parallel Universe (Score:3)
"Count yourselves lucky, at least it didn't kill 23 engineers when it collapsed."
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And because your brain superconducted, before you warmed up again were you able to solve all outstanding physics problems?
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2020 strikes again (Score:2)
"Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico collapses".
I don't know about you, but it seems on par with the rest of the year so far. The fact that it happened on the first day of the last month is also troubling. Will we get a new disaster every day of the month until 2021 finally arrives?
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"Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico collapses".
I don't know about you, but it seems on par with the rest of the year so far. The fact that it happened on the first day of the last month is also troubling. Will we get a new disaster every day of the month until 2021 finally arrives?
Who had nuclear winter for December 31?
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Sorry, I was down for giant meteor for December 31st. Missed it by *that* much.
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Which day does the Yellowstone supervolcano erupt?
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December 25.
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Seems appropriately melodramatic. May want to contact the script editor for this year with this suggestion.
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Wednesday
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That's okay, it's going to cancel global warming. /Futurama
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I just keep telling the guys at the National Cathedral to check whether the statues have started weeping blood, or have been twisted into unnatural, nightmarish positions. I don't think we can do anything about it, but you know, the head's-up is nice.
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Start singing the 12 days of Christmas.. "On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me; One Arecibo Collapse."
Save Money? (Score:2)
In the short term, this will certainly save a ton of money, as disassembling it safely would have been a huge engineering task. The big cost is that it destroyed tons of equipment. I'm not clear on what the value of that equipment was. If they still had it, only safely on the ground, how much would be reused? If they still had it, would it reduce the cost of building a new telescope, making it easier to get funding, or would it all have been scrapped anyway with any replacement getting all new equipment
Sad to see this happen.. (Score:2)
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.Rest In Pieces
It likely will in the Porto Rico scrap metal yards. I give it a week before parts start showing up.
Really concerning this failed, very bad estimation (Score:2)
Reading further details of the collapse earlier, apparently the cable that failed was supposedly at 60% of its rated load!!
That's why they thought they had five weeks to take it down.
It's really concerning that a project of that magnitude could have such a bad estimate for what load a cable could actually take. It makes me think maybe the cable itself was just build using non-spec steel...
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Rust never sleeps.
What? No F-35 thread yet? (Score:2)
Isn't that obligatory?
Great symbolism... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You do realize that Arecibo is located on US territory, right?
900-ton platform (Score:2)
I wonder if more modern technology would allow the suspended platform, which houses the receiving equipment, to be significantly lighter than when it was built in 1960? 900 tons seems like a tremendous amount of weight for sensor equipment.
Too old now (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mind you, but it still is a magical place and will always be one. Its history is full of it. It contains science, pioneering, action and drama. One can easily make several Hollywood movies from it.
Maybe instead of feeling sad about it, and I don't mean you in particular but people in general, should they just get on with it. There is no point in showing sadness and empathy for a dead, metallic object. Nobody made love to it. Scientific instruments, small and large, break all the time. Better save it for the
Now is the time... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you took the total cost of a complete, brand new Arecibo, with a state-of-the-art construction, all new machinery, the works, and divided it among the top 100 billionaires in the United States, the cost would probably not even reach 1% of the wealth of the poorest of them.
Maybe a bit of a concerted campaign on the news channels, newspapers and social media platforms some of them own might help convince them?
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That's your pet science project, but not necessarily theirs. Billionaires are far more interested in philanthropy than science when they want to burn their cash.
Sad (Score:2)
I am sad because it was such an iconic observatory.
That said, what capabilities were lost exactly ? Doesn't radio astronomy use massive arrays of dishes used as giant interferometers ? Like ALMA ? Do we still need such big dishes now ? I know Arecibo was able to EMIT radar waves and map asteroids but i do not know what other unique capabilities it had.
Every step of this story (Score:3)
Has been submitted to Slashdot, but only the initial cable and this made it.
I am glad we're discussing it now, but could the editors Please Think Of The Science Geeks?
Re:Thanks Trump (Score:5, Insightful)
BOTH GOP and Dems need to take the blame for allowing this.
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Your idiot flag is showing
This is not owned by the US Government.
And it is Congress that holds the purse strings and dictates what money is spent on, not the President.
You show why more people voting make some feel good, but is bad for everyone.
Re: Thanks Trump (Score:3)
It's owned by the NSF which is a US government agency.
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"You show why more people voting make some feel good, but is bad for everyone."
Because when less people vote, its just the most educated and wisest people; who understand the workings of government and its capabilities and limitations making the best choices for the people?
What possible rationalization do you have for that?
Fewer people voting just means the fanatics on both extremes show up.
As I see, it, more people voting is simply more people expressing an opinion on how they want to be governed. Full sto
Re: Thanks Trump (Score:2)
I guess there's technically still time for Infrastructure Week, but he is going to have a hard time getting anything built in the next 6 weeks
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bi-partisan / non-political / science based body
Ow! My sides!
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If Congress can't target money month to month how will they buy votes?
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Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnel in a steel cage match until they figure it out. If they don't and end up killing each other, take the next in line. Continue until desired result is achieved or we run out of government officials. But I repeat myself.
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There's no hard data that would determine that radio astronomy is somehow more worthy of tax dollars than, say, deep sea exploration. That's simply opinion. How do you measure and compare the value of scientific research objectively? Do we base it on past results? Well, toss out SETI, right?
Don't conflate pure, theoretical, objective science with the fight for funding, publication, prestige, etc, all of which are FILLED with politics, drama, and rivalries, just like any other human endeavor.
I'm not sayin