Arecibo radio telescope goes dark after snapped cable shreds dish | Hacker News Reader

Arecibo radio telescope goes dark after snapped cable shreds dish

sciencemag.org

261 pointsrmason64 comments

Scott Manley posted an excellent video with some discussion of this incident, as well as going over some of the major contributions Arecibo has made to science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V3VCt24tkE

This is sad. Puerto Rico has already been hit hard so many times. Agree or not, the observatory has a prominent place in pop culture, which helps bring the much needed visitors, and with them, awareness of Space Research and Science in general, in a time when sparking interest in STEM in the next generation is so important.

It's tragic. Unfortunately, it's easy to see things like this in terms of a pattern of neglected infrastructure in the US. Puerto Rico in general has been damaged and neglected to a criminal extent - this particular situation will get media attention for a bit, maybe be fixed but that's likely about it.

In this case, it's a complex story. NSF has a collection of astronomical observatories (optical and radio).

Some of them have decades-old equipment, and keeping everything operating will eventually preclude building anything new. So, NSF has been trying to offload some older observatories to universities, or consortia of universities - Arecibo is one such.

For instance, some older solar observatories were taken offline to build DKIST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telesco...), which is an amazing instrument, just now coming online.

Of course, there is a lot of strife and anger caused by reallocation of resources like this.

I'm on my way to look up DKIST, but after SOHO, it's hard to imagine needing ground based solar observatories. Of course, SOHO will eventually come to end of mission, so we definitely need other observatories. It's just the SOHO imagery is stellar.

You’re a little out of date! SoHO is largely shut down, has been for a decade now. Its tent pole instruments were replaced by SDO in 2010. (https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/)

Both of these are NASA, not NSF, observatories. They were (SoHO) and are (SDO) amazing resources that have advanced the whole area of heliophysics.

DKIST (NSF) has a 4m aperture. Unbelievable for a solar telescope, and of course, impossible to fly under reasonable NASA heliophysics budgets.

NSF's budget has has been anemic for the last 15+ years so projects get built then the maintenance budget evaporates in favor of some new program dictated by Congressional pork barreling. It wouldn't be a problem if the NSF budget grew at a steady pace, but the budget has only grown when one party has complete control of government and has shrunk otherwise (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which party is which).

> Puerto Rico in general has been damaged and neglected to a criminal extent - this particular situation will get media attention for a bit, maybe be fixed but that's likely about it.

Its an issue fraught with peril. Puerto Rico has no statehood, so they're a lesser property within the US as a whole. They have very little economy besides tourism to speak of, enormous amounts of corruption through the various governmental levels, and a populace that is rapidly aging. They plugged budget wholes with debt until it reached levels requiring an independent oversight board stepping in to take over. If you're able to find work on the mainland, you bounce, and only stick around on the island if you can't.

I'm not sure what the solution is. You can't write blank checks to a broken government forever.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/puerto-rico-us-territory-cr...

Tourism is only about 5-7% of Puerto Rico's economy. The majority is pharmaceutical manufacturing and services. It's true there is a lot of corruption. Colonialism seems to select for opportunistic and unprincipled public servants. If you want to learn about the island, I recommend you read War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson A. Denis. It does a good job of summarizing Puerto Rico's history with the United States. Best of luck.

Expanding on Puerto Rico's primary export...

Per the FDA, Puerto Rico produced (pre-Maria) $40B of pharmaceuticals for the US alone. 40 of those products and devices were deemed critical as they're the only producer or there's no viable alternative [1].

The largest (in terms of unit count) production was Normal Saline with Baxter's P.R. factory supplying 50% of U.S. hospitals with small volume saline bags (<=250mL as opposed to the more common 1L) prior to Hurricane Maria which took out their production facility [2]. The hurricane is widely credited as the cause of our national saline shortage (though as [2] details, it exacerbated a shortage that already existed for several other reasons).

[1] (PDF warning): https://www.fda.gov/media/108975/download

[2]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1800347

I was not aware pharma was still a significant part of the PR economy after the IRS Code Section 936 phase out. Thanks for the book suggestion, purchased, looking forward to the read.

Yes, the pharmaceutical tech there has decades of experience; one of the first companies I worked for was a Bay Area biotech firm. They moved a big chunk of manufacturing to Puerto Rico and seemed very impressed by the transition. It wasn't just a matter of lower expense. The tech experience in industrial chemistry was very good. Early 1990s.

I mean the obvious solution is statehood, but that's currently impractical for political reasons. Maybe an accident of fate will allow it within some years.

Not that it would fix all woes even, but it'd be a good start.

Agree statehood is the only fix, with a close second being NGO and similar efforts to get folks off the island to the mainland for better opportunities and quality of life. Anything else is a slow train wreck of despair over decades.

I live in Puerto Rico. Moving from here to the mainland is not a step up in quality of life, I can assure you.

That has not been the experience communicated to me by several Puerto Rican’s who relocated to central Florida. No work, crumbling infrastructure, and incompetent government was what I was told why they left.

To each their own (really; I wish you well if you have a good life there), but the emigration pattern is clear [1] [2].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/21/us/puerto-rico-migration-data...

[2] https://nacla.org/news/2018/02/22/puerto-rico%E2%80%99s-fore...

It's okay, we don't need Aracebo.

We've got China's FAST - Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

And Russia's RATAN-600 - радиоастрономический телескоп Академии наук – 600, an acronym for the "Academy of Sciences Radio Telescope – 600

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600

Speaking of which FAST also illustrates that such dishes are constructed with material/structure that cannot take heavy loads. FAST requires maintenance personnel on the dish surface to be attached to helium balloons so that their weight is reduced during inspection/maintanence related walking on the dish.

I don't think either FAST or RATAN are capable of radar astronomy (i.e. sending out a strong radio pulse and listening to the reflection). Arecibo's radar capability has led to numerous important discoveries, taught us a great deal about Mercury (including the period of its rotation and the fact that it has ice at its poles), and is still one of the most effective tools we have for examining low albedo solid objects within a few AU of earth (e.g. asteroids).

Even without that, Arecibo is still a very capable observatory, and it's not like we have an excess capacity of observatories doing this sort of work. We could have twice as many similar facilities and still keep them all busy.

I'd be curious if there were any science outreach programs for kids and adults that were made available to the people in Puerto Rico...

Story has been posted already 2 other times in the last 2 days?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128877

I didn't see it the first two times, so I'm happy it was posted again.

ditto

According to this paper [1] each of those panels is ~3x6 feet (presumably 1x2m) and RMS surface error across the primary surface of the antenna is ~5mm

http://gancell.com/papers/CMSC%202001_Final.pdf

> some steering is possible by moving the receivers, or antennas, around a platform suspended by cables high above the dish. The cable that broke this week was not one of the main support cables but one of several auxiliary ones added in the 1990s to stabilize the platform when a large new antenna, known as the Gregorian dome, was added.

If anyone is curious, in this article there is a picture where you can see the suspended platform with the "Gregorian dome":

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/12/901920638/puerto-ricos-arecib...

The thing that’s crazy about Arecibo is that it’s not just a telescope — it’s also a very high power transmitter, so they’re doing astronomy with RADAR. I didn’t know such a thing was even possible until this week.

Cool, so what do they target? It must be something reasonably close. Though I realize even light year reflections are possible!

> so what do they target?

Traditionally, Moon, Venus, asteroids.

Also:

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Radiation_astronomy/Radars#A...

"the round trip light time to objects beyond Saturn is longer than the time the telescope can track it, preventing radar observations of more distant objects."

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

"The Arecibo message is a 1974 interstellar radio message carrying basic information about humanity and Earth sent to globular star cluster M13. It was meant as a demonstration of human technological achievement, rather than a real attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials."

"The message consisted of 1,679 binary digits, approximately 210 bytes, transmitted at a frequency of 2,380 MHz and modulated by shifting the frequency by 10 Hz, with a power of 450 kW. The "ones" and "zeros" were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes."

Solar system: https://www.naic.edu/ao/scientist-user-portal/planetary-scie...

This dish was in the movie Goldeneye and apparently a lot of other films as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory

This dish is also the final level of the Nintendo 64 "Goldeneye" game - "Cradle"

It was also in Battlefield 4 ("Rogue Transmission")

No it isn't. The BF4 campaign takes place in China. The map for Rogue Transmission is a fictional location in Guizhou Province in southwest China.

I mean, yes, obviously it's not literally the Arecibo telescope in the same location, but it's a heavy inspiration and quite similar in design and structure. (For example, an obvious difference in BF4 is the surrounding forest, which not as dense as in Puerto Rico's location.)

I would say it takes inspiration from Arecibo over FAST but it's clearly neither. The surrounding topology is flat in comparison to either and there isn't much of a forest to speak of. It's clearly a level design that takes inspiration from reality.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gsveKZdntJc/maxresdefault.jpg

Correct! I did not mean to say that it was actually Arecibo in a different country, but rather that it was fairly heavily inspired by it.

I mentioned some of what you talk about in the latter part of your comment in another reply on a descendant of the GGP.

Is it fictional or based on the larger, similar looking Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope located in Guizhou? See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_...

I don't think it is, since FAST (finished 2016) wasn't finished until well after the game had been released (2013)—on the other hand, parts of it were built (FAST was started 2011), so perhaps there was partial inspiration? I'm honestly not sure, but certainly a lot of the design is much more similar to Arecibo (if memory serves me right).

I also haven't played the game in years, so take this with a grain of salt :)

It's fictional, the overall design of the cable towers is taken from Arecibo's, FAST's towers are distinctly different. It's clearly neither though as the surrounding topology is flat and mostly devoid of trees, both FAST and Arecibo are nestled in valleys dense in foliage. That sort of layout doesn't play well in video games.

It's obviously set in a non-jungle environment in the game so it's only superficially similar, but it's' scary how much the game looks like real life after the accident (The dish is destroyed in the game and the gameplay takes place on and under the half-destroyed dish).

IMO Contact being the best https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Contact.php

> The image used for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album cover, was originally created by radio astronomer Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory for his 1970 Ph.D. thesis.

For the benefit of other engineers who have not read the article:

The damage was done by a wire rope, not an electrical cable.

Glad I'm not the only one who initially read "cable" as more likely to be electrical than structural.

Arecibo? Makes me want to listen to Carbon Based Lifeforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifiICunJ-ZA

I've always been fascinated by the Arecibo Observatory. There was a ham radio operator who was an early employee there. I met him at the Dayton Ham convention in the early seventies.

I planned a trip to Puerto Rico around ten years later. Unfortunately I suffered bad food poisoning on Guadeloupe and by the time I got to San Juan I was so ill that I had to cut out the trip to Arecibo. Still want to see it someday.

What a shame, especially that the dome reflector was damaged too. I remember visiting in person and being awestruck by the sheer size and engineering skill needed to make this. Plus it provides needed tourism revenue for PR; I hope it's not abandoned.

Pretty sad that this happened. It is rather iconic.

Interesting, though, I did not realize my Alma Mater took over management of it.

These are the first pics of the underside I've ever seen. I'd like to see more of the infrastructure.

Watch the movie Contact. There's an entire scene underneath the dome.

also: http://www.mreclipse.com/Observatory/Arecibo/full/Arecibo03-...

Tom Scott did a video about Arecibo and posted a "behind the scenes" video on his second channel that covers a lot of interesting spaces in and around the telescope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZAWqk-wrzc

> Typically, such cables don’t fail in that way, which is “concerning,” he says.

Definitely aliens covering their tracks.

Is it the same one in x files e2m1? Sorry I meant s2e1 ahem

Yes. Arecibo is mentioned in the episode description, and the x-files episode is mention on the Arecibo wiki page.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751154/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory

Thanks! Good memory here...

Is it over for Arecibo then?

Just in time for the thing for which Oumuamua was a spent deceleration stage... :)

Came here to make alien attack joke.

Wow the extent of the damage is surprising. Seems like a pretty big design oversight. If one broken cable can cause such damage, there should be redundancy built in. One extra cable. "One is none, two is one". From the luxury of my hindsight chair.

A 3" cable of this type is not an insignificant thing. Have you ever seen the cables used to support telephone poles? Those are maybe 3/8" (working from memory). If you are a teenager running in the dark at full speed at night while attempting to evade being caught papering a friends house and catch one of these cables across your neck, you're going to have a very bad night. I've seen the results.

The damage isn't from something failing because there was no other support after this cable failed. It was this failing cable falling back to the ground that did the damage. If it were an object like a rock, it would just drop straight-ish down to make a hole where it impacts. This is a cable that would make that initial impact hole, but would continue to do damage as it was pulled into its final resting spot.

Oof... I caught one of those phone pole cables on the forehead running in the dark one night, and I caught the guy wire of a soccer net/goal under the chin one day during practice. Both very unpleasant experiences

There is actually quite a bit of redundancy in place, there are several cables which all still hold the larger instrumentation cluster in place above the dish and are able to tolerate a failure like the one that occurred.

This comment suggests that you did not read the article. I will quote some of the key points that you may have missed:

1. "The cable that broke this week was not one of the main support cables but one of several auxiliary ones"

2. "Because it contained a lot of stored energy from tension, it flailed around wildly, damaging the Gregorian dome and the main reflector of the dish"

3. "Typically, such cables don’t fail in that way"

From your comment, I think your underrstanding is that the cable failed and the section of the dish it was supporting failed due to lack of support.

That's not the case... The cable failed, and then the giant cable (with a ton of stored energy due to tension) impacted the dish (as well as some other bits of the antenna).

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