![]() “There’s not going to be a simple solution to regenerating that level of collecting area.” The next biggest radio dish in the United States is the 100-meter-wide Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. “Arecibo was the king” of spotting the fickle light of pulsars, Beasley says. As a pulsar rotates, it sweeps a beam of radio waves around in space like a lighthouse, which appears to Earth as a radio beacon flickering on and off. That incredible sensitivity made Arecibo particularly good at detecting hard-to-spot objects such as rapidly spinning neutron stars called pulsars ( SN: 1/3/20). With such a huge dish to collect radio waves, Arecibo could see very faint objects and phenomena. ![]() At 305 meters across - covering some 20 acres - Arecibo was the world’s largest radio dish from the time it was built in 1963 ( SN: 11/23/63) until 2016, when China completed its Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. “Arecibo was unique in several ways,” says Donald Campbell, an astronomer at Cornell University and a former director of the observatory. University of Central Floridaīut many of Arecibo’s capabilities can’t be easily replaced. In its 57-year lifetime, the huge radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (shown) made important discoveries in planetary science and astronomy. In the wake of Arecibo’s collapse, the radio astronomy community is “going to have to look at what was going on at Arecibo and figure out how to replace as best we can some of those capabilities with other instruments,” Beasley says. Arecibo has also been used for decades in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence ( SN: 11/7/92), and it beamed the first radio message to aliens into space in 1974 ( SN: 11/23/74). Arecibo views of Saturn’s moon Titan have revealed hydrocarbon lakes on its surface ( SN: 10/1/03).īeyond the solar system, Arecibo has observed mysterious flashes of radio waves from deep space, called fast radio bursts ( SN: 2/7/20), and the distribution of galaxies in the universe. ![]() And observations of the asteroid Bennu helped NASA plan its OSIRIS-REx mission to snag a sample from the space rock ( SN: 10/21/20). The observatory’s radar maps of the moon and Mars, for example, helped NASA pick landing sites for the Apollo ( SN: 5/1/65) and Viking missions ( SN: 7/17/76). “The life cycle of Arecibo was really quite remarkable, and it did some amazing science.” “The loss of Arecibo is a big loss for the community,” says Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va. Cables that suspended a platform of scientific instruments above the dish snapped, causing the platform to fall into the dish.įor Puerto Rico, losing Arecibo is like New York losing the Empire State Building, or San Francisco losing the Golden Gate Bridge, Rivera-Valentín says - but with the added tragedy that Arecibo was not just a cultural and historic icon, but a prolific research facility. But before the telescope could be dismantled, the entire instrument platform crashed down into the dish on December 1.Īfter suffering damage in recent months, the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed on December 1. After assessing the damage, the National Science Foundation, which funds Arecibo, announced that the telescope could not be safely repaired and would be torn down ( SN: 11/19/20). In August and November, two cables supporting a 900-metric-ton platform of scientific instruments above Arecibo’s dish unexpectedly broke. So the recent news that the Arecibo Observatory would shut down was “heartbreaking.” ![]() Now at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Rivera-Valentín continues to use Arecibo data to study planetary surfaces. “Looking at this gigantic telescope … getting to hear about all this neat work that was being done … it definitely leaves an impression.” Important science was happening right in the backyard of Rivera-Valentín’s hometown of Arecibo, Puerto Rico - and someday, Rivera-Valentín wanted to be a part of it.Īs an adult, Rivera-Valentín returned to the observatory to work as a planetary scientist, using Arecibo to map the shapes and motions of potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids. “I definitely remember this feeling of just being awestruck,” Rivera-Valentín says. Edgard Rivera-Valentín first visited the Arecibo Observatory as a little kid. ![]()
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