With the death of Arecibo, an era ends for radio astronomy

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Arecibo studied not just the ionosphere but also the surfaces of nearby planets and asteroids. But it was as a radio telescope that it truly excelled

was conceived in an era of space-age monumentalism, an imposition of geometry onto geology as striking in its simplicity and scale as the greatest brutalist architecture. When the James Bond franchise, in its pomp a showcase for iconic 1960s design, eventually got around to using the 306-metre dish as a location in the 1990s, the only surprise was that it had taken so long.

A free-standing dish big enough for the job would have been impractical. The designers therefore looked for a hole in the ground to repurpose. They found it in north-western Puerto Rico, a sinkhole where the limestone landscape had collapsed in just the right way. They built three towers on the sinkhole’s rim and hoisted the electronic heart of the instrument—the bit which emits and receives radio waves—into the empty space between them.

Arecibo was also used for radio astronomy’s wayward offshoot, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Since 1960 radio astronomers have occasionally employed their instruments to look for artificial signals from the stars. In 1974, after an upgrade that saw the original mesh replaced by a dish made up of 38,778 aluminium panels, Arecibo was used to go a step further. It transmitted a 1,679-bit message towards a star cluster 25,000 light-years away.

 

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Only Q is : Does a new one at the same place really make sense ? Proof needed ! Assumption : One of the B$-people can easily afford one.

Aracebo is not death requires essential repairs

This is how that cable snapped and the hole in the disk came about.

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