The Collapse of Puerto Rico’s Iconic Telescope | Hacker News Reader

The Collapse of Puerto Rico’s Iconic Telescope

newyorker.com

87 pointsgrzm57 comments

The collapse of Arecibo made me sad, like our space infra is in decay. Space X is a bright light and, I hope, represents a change in direction towards positive growth.

These two questions (Arecibo and SpaceX) are orthogonal. Arecibo is ground-based science. SpaceX is access to Earth orbit, not really anything to do with science or research.

NSF is an agency promoting research. It is continually handing old telescopes over to university consortia, and building the next generation of hardware. In this case, the handoff was bungled. A lot of technical debt had piled up. But it turns out to be really hard to get people to pay for upgrades and maintenance.

For more on the technical story of this collapse, see: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/how-famed-arecibo-te...

Yea, Arecibo aside, we're entering something of a golden age of ground-based observatories, so disagree we're in decay when it comes to such devices.

Would Starship allow for a much bigger telescope to be put in orbit?

Not really, Perseverance didn't even use spaceX. total cost is the limiting factor like it almost always is. Extremely large fairings are only needed when you need a complex piece up in a single piece.

Thanks. I imagined that for a really big telescope then a really big faring would be useful for that exact reason. Why isn’t that the case? Wouldn’t starship at least make it a lot cheaper to put a really big telescope in orbit?

Is Space X a brighter light than NASA landing a freakin' helicopter on Mars?

Yes; SpaceX is setting up Starlink, which is much brighter at night than any Mars mission.

Perseverance was ~1 ton of mass at launch, and cost ~$2.2B (plus $243M for the Atlas V rocket). SpaceX's Starship aims to deliver up to 100 tons of payload to Mars for ~tens of millions of dollars. Imagine how much science equipment that could be.

Among the ruins ... two seven-foot klystrons — specialized vacuum tubes that amplify radio frequencies — that had somehow survived the crash nearly intact. They had been installed shortly before the first cable broke and had never been used.

Neat example of where vacuum tubes are (were) still in use!

"The Arecibo Planetary Radar used two klystrons that provided a total power output of 1 MW (continuous) at 2380 MHz."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klystron

Klystrons also power LINACs and probably other types of particle accelerators, too.

You'll also see large vacuum tubes in industrial RF heaters, typically operating at 13.56MHz, which is a "garbage" frequency set aside for such uses.

I found this pretty interesting, there's a few classic frequencies in this list

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

It's also specifically the frequency of the a majority of RFID / NFC cards.

That's why -- it's a band that's by definition insensitive to noise, so nobody cares if there are a thousand industrial furnaces and a billion RFID readers screeching into it.

One of my astro profs from undergrad (John Wise) got married at Arecibo. I saw a pic online of him in a suit standing next to his wife in a wedding gown with the dish behind them... It's hard to articulate what that telescope really meant to people.

We have an old big solar bowl facility that has not been used for years (read abandoned) that we want to repurpose into a radio telescope. Anyone can recommend a potential grant or fund that is available to fund the effort?

Flash news, China is opening observations applications for the world's largest radio telescope (FAST) for scientists outside China starting this March 31 [1].

[1]https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-30/China-s-FAST-telescope...

Are there any plans to build a new, better telescope in the same location? Can we get that happening?

Puerto Rico is pretty vulnerable to hurricanes, which are only going to get worse going forward. And if they do eventually win a referendum on independence, then the facility would suddenly be on foreign soil.

US territories can really just leave like that?

Considering independence has never received more than 5% of the vote in any referendum held there, I don't think that's a question that will be answered one way or the other by Puerto Rico any time soon.

Independence by subterfuge has a very high chance of succeeding in Puerto Rico.

The status quo party was taken over by independence politicians (soberanistas) and they're restructuring the party as a Compact of Free Association party.

The Compact of Free Association is an agreement that the US made with former US territories that gained their independence like Palau and the Marshall Islands.

Several US based politicians strongly support that change so they're also pushing for it.

But why is it subterfuge?

The official name of Puerto Rico is Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico in Spanish and Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in English. The English name is not a translation of the Spanish name. A correct translation would be Free Associated State of Puerto Rico. Coincidentally the independent countries under the Compact of Free Association are called Free Associated States. The soberanistas are calling the new status definition Libre Asociación. Their goal is to convince people that Libre Asociación is not a form of independence but an enhanced Estado Libre Asociado. The independence political party has stated that they would also support this new status definition.

If the soberanistas succeed in getting the Estado Libre Asociado voters to vote for Libre Asociación in a binding referendum they'll make Puerto Rico an independent country.

The Philippines, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau are all former territories of the US that are now independent countries.

Although note that independence has historically been the least popular option on Puerto Rican status referendums.

The encoded Arecibo message to space was one of the earliest memories I have of science being amazing. I wonder if that project will continue on another facility

While the underfunding and collapse of the observatory is a tragedy, I think it is perhaps less surprising in the context that much of the original political will behind the observatory was motivated by potential military applications, which became somewhat passé after the fall of the Soviet Union. This "dual use" origin is mentioned briefly in the article here, but expanded in more length in some other sources [1,2]:

The origins of the observatory trace to late 1950s efforts to develop anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defenses as part of the newly formed United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ABM umbrella-effort, Project Defender. [...] It was known that hot, high-speed objects caused ionization of the atmosphere that reflects radar waves, and it appeared that a warhead's signature would be different enough from decoys that a detector could pick out the warhead directly, or alternately, provide added information that would allow operators to focus a conventional tracking radar on the single return from the warhead.

Although the concept appeared to offer a solution to the tracking problem, there was almost no information on either the physics of re-entry or a strong understanding of the normal composition of the upper layers of the ionosphere. ARPA began to address both simultaneously. To better understand the radar returns from a warhead, several radars were built on Kwajalein Atoll, while Arecibo started with the dual purpose of understanding the ionosphere's F-layer while also producing a general-purpose scientific radio observatory.

Some folks here may also be familiar with the US project to locate Soviet radar installations via signals reflected off the moon (as discussed in Steve Blank's excellent Secret history of Silicon Valley [3]), and it seems that Arecibo participated in this as well [4]:

The CIA employed a 150-foot dish antenna at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California to monitor Soviet radar signals reflected off the moon, while the National Security Agency used the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in Puerto Rico to intercept signals that had originally been transmitted from a Soviet Arctic Coast radar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Telescope#Design_and_c...

[2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37898/collapsed-arecib...

[3] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

[4] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB479/

Arecibo is part of a bigger story of the Puerto Rican decline: basically a US state with no voting rights and no chance of getting more equity. A vestige of American colonialism.

They vote on becoming a state with pretty frequent regularity.

All have failed[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Puerto_Rican_status_refer....

The 2020 referendum - less than 6 months ago - was pretty clearly aligned with statehood [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Puerto_Rican_status_refer...

Article points out that referendum had less than a 25% turnout.

That was 2017 - 2020 had more than 50%

The last 3 out of 6 total (every one since 2012) have had > 50% of the votes for statehood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico_political_status_p.... A fourth, in 1998, lost by only a couple percentage points to a 'none of the above' option.

> had > 50% of the votes for statehood

And how many people voted?

Compare the people that voted on the referendum with the general elections held and you’ll see people boycott it.

An aspect of the low turnout in these referendums is Peurto Ricans choosing to boycott them. In this case, they don't necessarily mean that there is a lack of engagement.

Why are they boycotting it? Is it because they don't want statehood or because they keep voting but nothing happens?

Well, seeing how a couple of the votes are shrouded in deep controversy, even allegations of rigging the results, I can see why people would just blow it off as yet another attempt to re-invent their society by a very vocal minority.

They not only vote on, but had an active left-wing terrorist group, FALN, that planted bombs and murdered American citizens in order to win Puerto Rican Independence from the U.S. The idea was that America was just holding them back from a socialist paradise.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuerzas_Armadas_de_Liberación_...

https://www.navycthistory.com/sabana_seca_bus_tragedy_1979_1...

In 1999, Bill Clinton offered pardons to some of the terrorists but it was conditional on their promising to renounce violence. Oscar Lopez Rivera refused to do so, but was pardoned by Obama. Rivera, who planted bombs that killed two Americans, is friends with Lin Manuel Miranda, who has no problem publicly praising Rivera, even today.

US citizens residing in Puerto Rico do not vote on the presidential elections.

> US citizens residing in Puerto Rico do not vote on the presidential elections

Do you have a source for this? As far as I'm aware, US Citizens can absentee vote from out of the country without issue.

Of course.

Residents Puerto Rico can’t vote in presidential elections.

It’s not out of the country.

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

>Voting rights of United States citizens in Puerto Rico, like the voting rights of residents of other United States territories, differ from those of United States citizens in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. Residents of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories do not have voting representation in the United States Congress, and are not entitled to electoral votes for president. The United States Constitution grants congressional voting representation to U.S. states, which Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories are not, specifying that members of Congress shall be elected by direct popular vote and that the president and the vice president shall be elected by electors chosen by the states.[Note 1]

For as amazing as this instrument was for it's time, it came with _a lot_ of limitations. I was sad to see it's demise, but the technology has been superseded.

From what I understand this is not the case. There is no replacement for some of the work this telescope could do, mostly around the ability to also act as a giant RADAR with its powerful transmitters.

Radar is not very useful if it can't be pointed at something

Source needed.

> The Arecibo telescope had been upgraded regularly, with several new instruments slated for installation in the coming years. “The telescope is in no way obsolete,” says Christopher Salter, an astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory, who worked at Arecibo for years.

Where did you get the idea that the technology's been superseded?

The NANOGrav collaboration is trying to use millisecond pulsars to determine if a galaxy-wide analysis of 47 pulsars can detect gravitational waves.

The team says that Arecibo was instrumental for their data analysis because the telescope was unique in its radio sensitivity:

"Although NANOGrav does not expect the situation to result in significant delays in detection due to years of very sensitive Arecibo data already contributing to their datasets, the loss of Arecibo is a terrible blow to science, and will impact NANOGrav’s ability to characterize the background and detect individual sources in the future."

http://nanograv.org/press/2021/01/11/12-Year-GW-Background.h...

The tragedy of the inert beurocracy. The decline of the physical supports of this radio telescope was known for years. Maintenance was neglected for years, a well paid beurocracy used up all available funds. All well documented. They needed to allocate funds to maintain that cannot be used to swell bureaocrat's pockets - Puerto Rico is well known for this. It is possible that funders became exhausted at this political game that they starved it of funds intentionally - intending to direct funds to mm arrays and other new projects where there is less political cronyism. Now it is dead - how big is the budget now?

Lift observatories to space, beyond the clutches of inept bureaucracies and natural decay from on-planet neglect.

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

Yes, this is the trend. With lower cost of launches, I would like to see more remote observatories at the stable lagrange points where they are immune from most man made interference and the inherent stability does not burn consumables to any degree - one assumes solar will suffice for energy.

That solves nothing, without maintenance space-based telescopes will run out of consumables (cryogenics to cool the sensors, etc) or their orbits will eventually decay, or they will eventually need hands-on maintenance.

Nothing lasts forever, even in space.

Hubble has been operational for about 30 years. An observatory needs to last only for its expected lifetime, until its successor arrives in orbit. One would expect to be lifting newer, improved platforms to orbit on a brisk cadence as the cost of launch continues to decline.

and in that time it's required four servicing missions - which require someone to pay for them, you know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servici...

sending up shorter-lived observatories which are disposed of after a fixed lifespan is fine, that's already the model for stuff like lagrange observatories, those are obviously never going to get a shuttle servicing crew. but it doesn't fix the overall problem that science doesn't get funded on an ongoing basis, if there isn't funding then there will never be any followup missions with disposable observatives either, it will just be the one short-term mission and that's it, we're done.

again, you haven't actually solved the problem that science costs money and someone has to pay for it, whether you're operating on a model of servicing a high-end expensive instrument or a repeated missions with disposable ones, and whether it's terrestrial or space-based one. someone has to pay to replace the space-based disposable instrument if you want to continue that capability, the problem is nobody will want to pay for the next mission just like nobody wanted to pay to maintain Arecibo.

if you can come up with some way to guarantee ongoing funding for disposable missions then congrats, please let the world know, we can apply that same thing to enduring scientific instruments too. shouting 'disposable missions!' alone isn't a plausible solution for the actual problem here, it's just spacex fetishism. Cheap launches are great but it doesn't solve the problem of funding - someone still has to buy a new instrument and pay to launch it.

Moreover missions will naturally evolve to fit the available launch capacity and expenses. when launch capability is cheap, you will get bigger and more sensitive systems that cost more to build and launch. That's a good thing, in the birds-eye view that will be missions with greater scientific capabilities than we could reasonably mount today, but just cheap launch capacity isn't going to magically drive costs to zero, except for some fixed-capacity 'today mission' which will eventually be of no scientific value. Onwards and upwards is the name of the game.

Hubble has had 4 servicing missions, each of which cost an entire shuttle launch. Hubble is extremely expensive to service -- and it's currently running with two broken gyroscopes, since there's no shuttle to service it and nobody has the budget to do a SpaceX launch to fix it when it's "working fine". JWST, its replacement, has been in a warehouse for thirty years. "In space" doesn't fix any of the problems!

> JWST, its replacement, has been in a warehouse for thirty years

JWST development was started in 1996 (25 years ago), so it can't have been in a warehouse for 30 years. The detailed design phase was ongoing in 2007 and assembly of the primary mirror was only completed in 2016 (dates from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope).

Perhaps you're thinking of the National Reconnaissance Office telescopes that were offered to NASA in 2012 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...)? Those are similar telescopes to Hubble in some ways, and one is being used for the WFIRST mission.

Despite sometimes being billed as such, JWST can only be partly considered a replacement for HST. HST has ultraviolet observing capabilities (wavelengths a short as ~90nm), while JWST observes primarily in the infrared, with some capability to wavelengths of 600nm. There's some overlap (in the 600nm-1600nm range), but JWST can observe out to about 28,000nm (28micron) wavelengths. The JWST wavelength range is perhaps more comparable to that of the Spitzer Space Telescope (particularly the IRAC and IRS instruments, covering 3.5-40microns; MIPS covered out to 160microns). The LUVOIR concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infr...) would probably have the better claim to being an HST successor, given its proposed UV capabilities.

Hubble cost $5B to launch, and has racked up another $5B in ongoing costs sense.

Aricebo cost $9.3m ($80m inflation adjusted), had had an annual operating budget of $12m.

In other words, you could fund 100 Ariceobs for 1 Hubble.

Hubble is not supporting your case one iota.

SpaceX, StarLink, Relativity Space, and Planet Labs would be better examples I suppose. The odds of space technologies getting cheaper versus more expensive is pretty good imho, including remote sensing and observatories.

space-based astronomy is ridiculously expensive, as well as not being a straight upgrade to ground-based astronomy. If we can't get the funding to maintain existing ground-based telescopes, what's the hope of getting many times that for space-based telescopes?

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