Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself
- Reference: 1606842011
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/01/arecibo_collapse/
- Source link:
Before and after shots of the facility show the triangular platform, which had hung over the dish, is no longer in place.
Ayer fue la última vez que visite esta belleza de lugar. Lamentablemente agonizaba. Aquí imágenes de ayer y hoy. [1]pic.twitter.com/jWuAwtUc1s — Deborah Martorell (@DeborahTiempo) [2]December 1, 2020
The pictures tell their own story: it is safe to say that the developments will have finished off the observatory for good. At least in its current guise.
It is an ignoble end for the facility, which has served the scientific community for nearly 60 years, notching up discoveries as well as playing a vital role in the recovery of the SOHO mission at the end of the last century.
The observatory, located in Puerto Rico, had suffered severe damage at the hands of Hurricane Maria in 2017 before a cable supporting the 900-ton platform above the dish fell down in [3]August this year , ripping a gash in the panels below.
The dish was further damaged by another failed cable in [4]November and later that month the National Science Foundation (NSF) decided that things had gone beyond the point where repairs could safely be made and [5]decided to demolish the structure .
The plan called for a decommissioning of the observatory followed by a "controlled demolition." The weakened structure appears to have brought things forward somewhat with this morning's collapse, which will have come as a body-blow to those hoping for a miraculous rescue for the veteran structure.
A spokesperson for the NSF told The Register : "We can confirm the platform fell unexpectedly and that we have reports of no injuries."
Something to be thankful for. However, today remains a sad day indeed for science and radio astronomy. ®
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[1] https://t.co/jWuAwtUc1s
[2] https://twitter.com/DeborahTiempo/status/1333747356605571072?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/12/arecibo_observatory_damaged/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/10/arecibo_telescope_damage/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/arecibo_telescope_decommissioned/
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
::insert moment of silence::
::starts drafting letter to Biden administration re: routine maintenance of nationally and internationally important US owned scientific kit::
Were any British agents in the vicinity at the time of the collapse?
Didn't help with an operator heard yelling, "Yes, I am invincible" just after it had collapsed and just before the coolant leaked out.
CCTV footage here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HFkF8904Uw
Very sad, but...
After 60 years of service it sounds like cumulative metal fatigue. Not a lot to be done to prevent it, but it might have been possible to monitor it and replace fatigued cables before they failed. I guess the problem is that limited budgets get preferentially allocated to new projects and older ones just go on being used on the basis that they're still working.
Re: Very sad, but...
Older ones get ignored on the basis of "what the hell do you want maintenance money for?? we paid to build the damn thing, didn't we??"
Re: Very sad, but...
Fortunately this is only an old (almost) obsolete telescope not a bridge, highway or dam or other [1]vital infrastructure
[1] https://www.asce.org/infrastructure/
Re: Very sad, but...
That's often the way of large research projects these days - apply for funding to build the instrument, get funding yay! Who runs it/maintenance? Hmm we'll think about that later, i.e. we hope some kind soul will foot the bill since shame to let this expensive instrument go to waste.
Re: Very sad, but...
The facility was originally built largely (maybe completely?) using funding from the Department of Defense. So like the overall missile defense program from the 60s that the dish was originally affiliated with, that source of funding may have dried up as the DoD's priorities changed.
I don't blame the DoD really, because the military budget has gone from probably 8% or 10% of U.S. GDP in the early 60s to about 3.7% of GDP now.
Re: Very sad, but...
"After 60 years of service it sounds like cumulative metal fatigue"
Or just good old corrosion...
Re: Very sad, but...
Union Bridge, opened in 1820, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Bridge,_Tweed it's possible to keep these things up if you maintain them. As you say, paying for it is the issue.
Just a thought - is it possible some administrative function has been paying insurance on it for the last 60 years?
yes...but....extenuating circumstances.....only covers....dependent on maintenance checks...."the insurance clearly states on page 8 paragraph 6, humidity can be no more than 60%"
Large companies, and governments, tend to self-insure. It's cheaper, in the end, if you can absorb the occasional spikes of big payouts.
Lucky
That it happened all by itself and not when someone was laying charges to bring it down n a controlled way. Judging from the pictures, the three towers remain sans cables, so the whiplash when the 900 ton platform dropped and the cables snapped would have been lethal to anyone in the way.
It did some great observing, but now it should be safe enough to salvage the remains of the dish for science museums around the world.
Sad though, as it is the end of an era.
There was a [1]Gofundme for stray cats at Arecibo ; maybe we should have started one for maintenance, too.
[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/nsr7sn-helping-arecibo-observatory-cats
Moichandising!
I bet they could make money by cutting the remnants into small chunks and selling them online, sort of like the old Berlin Wall.
Re: Moichandising!
when's the next star wars movie? ewoks scavenge, don't they?
Re: Moichandising!
Which begs a question where were the Ewoks in the last film?
Re: Moichandising!
Much better to turn it into a massive skate/bike park. A half-dome instead of a half-pipe, you see.
That now leaves a space to design and build a more flexible radar capable telescope for doing all those jobs that Arecibo did.
Start planning now.
That now leaves a space for a more capable radar/telescope to do the jobs that Arecibo did better than any other.
Whether it is built in the same place , or somewhere else .
Start planning now,
Although in special relativity space and time are [kind of] the same thing and they say “time is money”, I am not sure about the exact process which transmutes space to money…
Two words: real estate.
Quit Listening To Our Private Conversations
The aliens were never too fond of the SETI project and said so back in 1974. We just didn't understand what the message was at the time.
Shame
I suppose all engineering things come to the end of their life but I can't help wondering what regular maintenance had been done (if at all) and if the outcome would have been different if a bit more money had been spent on cable inspections and the like. Stuff like that, exposed to the elements, is bound to corrode with (as has been seen) disastrous results. Great pity that the unique icon had to end its days in such an ignominious fashion.
First dibs!
On using it for a really cool Sci-Fi flick that will have lots more disasters without risk of damaging it further!
Hulse-Taylor
The Hulse-Taylor pulsar was discovered in 1974 using Arecibo, and many – perhaps most – of the observations of it were done there. Hulse-Taylor is extremely significant, to put it rather mildly. After discovering it, Hulse & Taylor realised, based on periodic shifts in the frequency, that it was a binary system with two neutron stars in orbit around each other, of which we were 'hearing' one. And then by making observations over long periods they discovered that the period of the orbit was decreasing: the system was losing energy. Well, General Relativity predicts that such a system should emit significant amounts of power through gravitational waves, and the predictions of GR agree extremely accurately with the observations.
Hulse-Taylor thus provided a very important experimental test of GR and was the first (indirect) detection of gravitational waves. Whether LIGO would have been built without the evidence it provided I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wouldn't have been. Hulse & Taylor won a Nobel prize for this.
And that's far from all it did. The critical observations of the pulsar at the centre of the Crab Nebula, and hence the discovery of neutron stars, were done there in 1968.
This place was so important.
A sad ending
For an exceptional piece of kit.
But at least it went out with a bang, or a crump.
Inevitable
Around 2001 NASA had already withdrawn funding for Arecibo, and the observatory got pushed off onto NSF, which had so much interest in running the site that by 2014 they were looking to decommission the place despite NASA pouring in a few million of funding a year again around 2012. Only a group led by the University of Florida putting in money saved it.
The time to save Arecibo was probably around 2001. From there it has been a slow slog into corrosion and wear on the supporting cables and other structures. As engineers who examined the structure earlier this year noted, the cables had degraded to a point where they could not take more than half of their originally rated load.
Arecibo hadn't seen a maintenance budget and only a minimal operating budget for the last two decades. There is no large infrastructure project that can survive that long without maintenance and not suffer some kind of catastrophic failure. Just ask the US what happened to the last few bridges where they skimped on maintenance.
with apologies to Horace Smith
We wonder, — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where once it stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
The Chile's desert is the ideal place, nor hurricane country
Of all the places out there to "Look at space" Chile's desert is considered one of the best ones.
https://www.astronomictourism.com/astronomical-observatories-chile.html
A bit of a shame what happened to this one but is not like "The weather conditions are going to get more extreme" has not been a know thing since the seventies.
Granted back then people believed the World was going to get... COLDER, not warmer.
It is literally a black hole...
Paris, because, well...