I’d be interested to hear from folks with expertise whether that is right or wrong.
As a child, I loved going there and its the earliest part of my childhood that I remember something motivating me to pursue science/math. Even in my later part of my life I was able to do some research with the observatory which kick started my current career.
The island already suffers from a lack of funding in education, thus I fear the youth might miss out on this sense of awe and curiosity I was lucky enough to have as a child.
Another issue is that we have our brightest minds leaving the island because there's no fulfilling or well paying work to be done. The lack of this observatory is another reason more people will leave.
Here's a white paper the people in the observatory wrote about a new dish. It contains reasoning, beyond my socio-cultural observations, for having a new one. http://www.naic.edu/NGAT/NGAT_WhitePaper_v2_01022021.pdf
i.e. there's 50 other states and D.C. competing to be the most attractive to big ticket project funding, which also deliver education, youth initiatives, high paying jobs, etc.
In this case, the calculus may simply be that the mission can be more comprehensively and efficiently achieved via investments elsewhere that will similarly benefit Americans near those areas as a reinvestment would have benefitted in Puerto Rico.
The story of the death of Arecibo is a stain on the way the United States treats its colonial territories.
All 3 referenda in PR since 2010 have favored statehood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_movement_in_Puert...
Therefore. Since nobody in Congress or White House lifts a finger, the referendum becomes just another political rally cry for the local pro-statehood party.
The United States and their political class have made it exceedingly clear that they favour the status quo -- both economically and politically -- at the expense of the island folk who suffer increasing austerity cuts and a deteriorating standard of living.
Statehood and its benefits isn’t something to be unilaterally demanded. Puerto Rico should have the option to declare independence. But it’s far too corrupt for political integration.
The US government has the full might of the US military, a reluctant political class and an economic interest in keeping the status quo.
There has to be cooperation in both sides for either statehood or independence, if decolonization is to be achieved peacefully. Sadly, there's no will to negotiate from the US gov’t.
About corruption, well, it’s true. Our ex-governor was recently indicted.
However, I also find corruption allegations a convenient way to perpetuate this image of Puerto Ricans as freeloaders—completely missing how much the mainland benefits from us economically, both as a tax haven and as a source of tax revenue (no IRS federal tax, but Jones Act import restrictions).
For more on economic benefits, think about this: a market of 2-3 million people locked in exclusively into US goods and markets due to colonial import restrictions.
Taxation without representation.
1) All goods sold in PR have to pass by mainland US ports, raising living costs significantly. This means re-boarding into a US vessel on the mainland, then sailing to PR if coming internationally.
2) We pay other federal taxes (as freelancer, I pay social security tax among others).
3) Related to #1, customs taxes and levies on all goods transported, paid to the US Treasury.
This is an excellent overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Puerto_Rico
“I think that the benefit for the community that infrastructure investment provides is so much greater than rebuilding the telescope, to the point that if I had absolute control of the limited gov budget I’d allocate all money to infrastructure.”
That’s debatable, but it doesn’t seem like a logical fallacy.
If you want to help, becoming a proper, independent country could be a good start. The majority of citizens opposes the current colonial status, as evidenced by several referendums, but, well, it’s not theirs to decide - because they are just a colony and aren’t allowed to vote.
From Title 8-ALIENS AND NATIONALITY CHAPTER 12-IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY SUBCHAPTER III-NATIONALITY AND NATURALIZATION Part I-Nationality at Birth and Collective Naturalization
All persons born in Puerto Rico on or after April 11, 1899, and prior to January 13, 1941, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, residing on January 13, 1941, in Puerto Rico or other territory over which the United States exercises rights of sovereignty and not citizens of the United States under any other Act, are declared to be citizens of the United States as of January 13, 1941. All persons born in Puerto Rico on or after January 13, 1941, and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are citizens of the United States at birth.
Real is probably the wrong term here, but certainly a citizen without the full suite of rights granted to you. If you have all the obligations without all the rights, you are a second class citizen. It's frankly absurd that someone can live within the US as a "citizen" without getting have meaningful representation.
People born, raised and still living in DC, Puerto Rico, US virgin islands, Guam, and Marianas are being punished for not breaking the law.
> Real is probably the wrong term here, but certainly a citizen without the full suite of rights granted to you.
I acknowledged the thing you are objecting to before you started objecting. If you want to bikeshed a loosely used term after it's been acknowledged as being the incorrect term - have fun.
And before we get into a debate about whether ex-cons "deserve" rights, their sentence is supposed to be them paying their debt to society. Why shouldn't their rights be restored after that?
If Puerto Rico and DC were suddenly made part of California, nothing would change but suddenly they'd be "first class citizens"? (Besides now paying federal income tax)
DC being part of California would marginally change the distribution of the House. Agreed the Senate & FPTP is undemocratic.
Puerto Rican residents can vote on everything aside from federal elections.
And yeah, becoming a US state would be better than independence, but it won't happen, because - you guessed it, you can't vote. By becoming an independent country you could get major powers to compete to do business with you - I'm pretty sure China would invest billions into your infrastructure, you could literally become America's Taiwan.
It kinda feels like you're trying to shame Puerto Ricans for being the USA's bitches or something but I don't think that's reasonable. Puerto Ricans are US citizens and can move anywhere in the USA which is not only valuable and lets them send money home but shows that they're respected as just other Americans.
> By becoming an independent country you could get major powers to compete to do business with you - I'm pretty sure China would invest billions into your infrastructure, you could literally become America's Taiwan.
Leave the one country that helps you, though maybe not enough, to be the puppet of their enemy. Like that's not going to end in pain, but that's not your concern as an outsider trying to accelerate chaos.
So, a colony? Taxation without representation. We might not get taxed IRS federal planillas, but all the levies and duties plus the harmful Jones Act beg to differ with your characterization.
The US is choking our economy in its current status. Statehood or independence, a binding referendum is urgent at this point.
Oh, and don't you remember how the US Supreme Court declared us second-class citizens recently? [0]
[0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/scotus-declares-u-...
How did the US acquire said territory? And after they acquired it, what did they do to those who did not want their nation to be a "territory?" For those unaware, I'll give you a hint: it did not involve a hearty Socratic discussion followed by a game of badminton [0].
> If you think puerto rico becoming it's own country and missing out on the aid, support and ease of travel provided by the federal government you are either malevolent or naive.
This worked out rather well for the Hawaiians, who are currently having their groundwater poisoned by the US military [1], and their ancestral land acquired by mainlanders while they are made homeless [2].
In the recent non-binding referenda, and the bill to have a binding referendum which recently died in committee, there has been an option for "independence with free association" -- that is, an independent nation-state but with strong free trade and free travel agreements baked in [2]. Statehood is that, plus being subject to the whims of voters in Wisconsin, Idaho, et al. as to whether Puerto Ricans should be allowed funding for things. Keep in mind that there is no way out of this setup short of insurrection.
Given Puerto Rico has a distinct language, culture, etc. from the US, I can only assume we're deciding that the Westphalian model of the nation-state is not a consideration. Given this, I would also like to propose the following for statehood:
1. Korea
2. Vietnam
3. Iraq
4. Iran
5. Afghanistan
6. Somalia
7. Syria
8. Mexico
9. Haiti
10. Dominican Republic
These countries would surely flourish with the support and aid provided by the US federal government. And they were already, at one point or another, occupied by the US. So I can think of no reason not to annex them, short of naïveté or malevolence.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utuado_uprising
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/04/the-us...
[2]: https://thehomemoreproject.org/blog/the-hawaiian-homelessnes...
The veterans who died for the continental US beg to differ.
> If you want to help, becoming a proper, independent country could be a good start.
The US government has the full might of the US military, a reluctant political class and an economic interest in keeping it that way. It's difficult -- whether you're pro-statehood or independence.
Only if they skipped their history classes - dying for the empire is a standard part of being a colony.
(This would probably be a lot easier to get funded if Puerto Rico were a state...)
Maybe look past your sentimentality and notice that if money in Puerto Rico goes to anything it should be the electrical grid itself that manages to go down for weeks anytime something as mild as a tropical depression looks in the island's direction.
> Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens; however, Puerto Rico is not a U.S. state, but a U.S. insular area. Consequently, while all Puerto Rico residents pay federal taxes, many residents are not required to pay federal income taxes. Aside from income tax, U.S. federal taxes include customs taxes, federal commodity taxes, and federal payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment taxes).
Any attempt to give PR statehood or make it part of an existing state (Florida, I guess?) would meet with vociferous objection from Puerto Rico.
The problem with this line of logic isn't that it's wrong or even that it ignores the goal of scientific funding to produce scientific research. The primary problem with this line of argument is that it's equally good for Wyoming, West Virginia, and a dozen or more other deprived places that could all benefit substantially from the STEM-inspiration of a local megaproject.
I really wish it had been built.
Honestly seems like this is what they considered most when deciding to turn it into an education center.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
I see it was built for $9.3M in 1960.
Now they're estimating the cleanup cost alone to be $50M.
Inflation adjusted - it should cost ~$95M to re-build. I'm not sure how if you'd need to include the total $50M cleanup on top of that.
Either way - if it can be re-built for $95M - that seems like a better deal than spending $50M to clean it up.
If a private developer wants to take it over and turn it into a tourist destination, let them spend their own money. Throw them some tax incentives, maybe.
$95M would be a great deal to new science projects. India put an orbiter around Mars for less. We could start studying a distributed array approach to whatever comes after JWST.
I've long assumed that complete restoration being an assumed mandatory consequence of shutdown was itself a successful gambit from parties that wanted to keep the instrument operational. :)
I thought telescope mirrors had to be absurdly pure.
It seems like it would make for a super cool museum.
It's not an ideal museum location in and of itself because it's almost an hour drive out of the city across some not-sutiable-for-high-traffic mountain roads (see the beginning of the movie Contact for a pretty reasonable view of what the trip out and in is like).
Presumably the idea is that if we go around building stuff and just abandoning it we're doing unnecessary harm to nature as well as creating hazardous environments, e.g. when people go in to take the scrap metal and have stuff collapse on them.
It's a radio telescope, so think more along the lines of like a giant satellite dish. At the wavelength of the radio frequency signals, the tiny dust etc don't matter until they start to build up.
> Why does it need to be cleaned up?
The recent natural disaster(s?) in Puerto Rico damaged it massively, which given its sophistication and size likely means there's stuff strewn everywhere and facility damage. You don't generally want to leave government facilities to degrade to the extreme in disuse, so you still want to stabilize things to make it safe to traverse the area and be able to safely achieve the next goal of the facility and surrounding area.
> Fifth, Arecibo's larger secondary platform also housed several transmitters, making it one of only two instruments in the world capable of radar astronomy. ... The NASA-funded Planetary Radar System allowed Arecibo to study solid objects from Mercury to Saturn, and to perform very accurate orbit determination on near-earth objects, particularly potentially hazardous objects.
China's 500m telescope wouldn't be able to capture https://www.planetary.org/space-images/radar-images-of-aster... because it can't send a pulse.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010DPS....42.1317B/abstra...
> We report Arecibo (2380 MHz, 13 cm) and Goldstone (8560 MHz, 3.5 cm) delay-Doppler radar observations of binary near-Earth asteroid (NEA) 65803 Didymos (1996 GT) obtained on five dates between November 14-26, 2003 during the asteroid's approach within 0.048 AU.
You'll note the Goldstone mention there and the "making it one of only two instruments in the world" from the wiki link on the 500 meter article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_astronomy
> There is one remaining radar astronomy facility in regular use, the Goldstone Solar System Radar.
There is a comment lower down saying Green Bank might add radar:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33233119
I’m not in a position to confirm whether that is true though.
> The National Science Foundation has awarded funds for the conceptual design of a higher-power radar system on the GBT – one that would be nearly 1,000 times more powerful than the proof of concept. In addition to a more powerful transmitter, NRAO and GBO, working with industry partners, will leverage new, solid-state amplifier and array receiving-system technologies to maximize the effectiveness of the new system. In parallel to this, as additional funding is allocated, the team plans to move to final design and construction activities, beginning in 2023.
> The GBT’s new radar capabilities will introduce a tool that astronomy has not had before, collecting data at higher resolutions and at wavelengths not previously available. NRAO and GBO also are developing advanced data reduction and analysis tools that have not been available before. The flexibility and increased performance of this new system will fill an important need for planetary defense, and also allow astronomers to observe asteroids, comets, planets and moons. The versatility of this system will contribute to many areas of science.
> Using the information collected with this latest test, the participants will finalize a plan to develop a 500-kilowatt, high-power radar system that can image objects in the Solar System with unprecedented detail and sensitivity. The increased performance also will allow astronomers to use radar signals as far away as the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, increasing our understanding of the Solar System.
> “The planned system will be a leap forward in radar science, allowing access to never before seen features of the Solar System from right here on Earth,” said Karen O’Neil, the Green Bank Observatory site director.
That use of the word "unprecedented" and looking at Uranus and Neptune suggests to me that it will go further than Arecibo did... three decades ago.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000DDA....31.0803N/abstra...
> In October 1999 we obtained the first radar images of Saturn's rings, using the recently-upgraded Arecibo telescope operating at a wavelength of 12.6 cm. The opening angle of the rings was 19.9o, and dual-circular polarization data were collected over a period of 5 days. The resulting delay-Doppler maps have a range resolution of 100 msec and a frequency resolution of 2 kHz, corresponding to a spatial resolution cell of 15000 x 2000 km. Previous radar observations (e.g., Ostro et al. [1982] Icarus 49, 367) demonstrated the rings' high cross section and depolarization ratio, but did not yield 2-dimensional images.
The key thing with this is the radar astronomy rather than radio astronomy.
The tracking is likely what's at play for the Uranus and Neptune though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Telescope
> The round trip light time to objects beyond Saturn is longer than the 2.6-hour time that the telescope could track a celestial position, preventing radar observations of more distant objects.
Uranus is about 2.5 light hours Neptune is about 4 light hours from us. Double that for the round trip time.
The primary interesting part of this is getting the accurate ephemeris of near earth asteroids.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/acm2008/pdf/8285.pdf
> Arecibo Doppler measurements (2380-MHz, 12.6- cm) of asteroid 99942 Apophis, obtained in August 2005 and May 2006, have been combined with optical astrometry reported through August 2006 to produce a new orbit solution.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001910352...
> During these encounters the Arecibo and Goldstone radar stations collected seven Doppler and 22 delay measurements of Bennu. For a general description of radar astrometry see Yeomans et al., 1987, Ostro et al., 2002. This wealth of ground-based tracking data allows an extremely accurate description of Bennu’s motion (Chesley et al., 2014). The trajectory of Bennu is deterministic until 2135, when a close encounter with Earth leads to strong scattering and makes the knowledge of its future motion statistical.
---
So it looks like Green Bank will have improved transmitter and tracking. It won't have quite the sensitivity of Arecibo, but it's still one of the more impressive resources.
https://www.wboy.com/news/west-virginia/green-bank-telescope...
> The Green Bank Observatory, in conjunction with the Goldstone radio telescope in California, has been monitoring the pair of asteroids over the two weeks following the experiment on Sept. 26. Observations found not only that the trajectory had been changed successfully, but that it exceeded the initial expectations for how large the shift would be.
From https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/green-bank-telescope-help...
> Green Bank Telescope radar observations of the asteroid Dimorphos after it was deliberately struck by a NASA spacecraft on Sept 26 were used to confirm the success of the first-ever full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology
The key here is that as mentioned Goldstone is the other radar astronomy capable observatory and its radar observations. RAdio Detection And Ranging. Those require the ability to transmit a radio pulse.
But absouyltely it's neat what they're doing with it.
Have a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=518&v=2qiu86-ZZdU
Unless there have been some advances in large scale wave forming, a giant dish is the only way to beam out powerful radar.
Arecibo did receive military funding, but that was because the military was interested in the behavior of the ionosphere. It was always a general science and technology development platform.
Soviet tech allowed members, and equipment, to cross the borders of the country. ;)
Further, Arecibo works at frequencies of 10-40 MHz, substantially lower than even the lowest frequency radars. With secondary reflections you might be able to detect that a radar pulse had been detected, but determining where it came from or even what emitted it would be extremely challenging.
I suppose perhaps Cuba could have been spied upon with it, but again it's just the worst design for the application.
EEEeeee.. don't confuse the weird biases in scientific research from publication incentives as being a true metric of scientific utility.
There is a tremendous bias in favor of "new" instruments because the low hanging discoveries made possible on something new (not even necessarily 'better' just different) haven't been made yet. But much of that research is extremely superficial and doesn't go on to contribute much to the forward body of knowledge -- it just helps churn out papers to support career progression.
Arecibo was thoroughly unmatched in several respects, particular as a radar[1]. It was also the premier instrument for validating observations made on synthetic aperture instruments since as a single aperture it's largely free of the artifacts that synthetic aperture instruments. Validation is scientifically critical but also doesn't tend to produce a lot of high profile papers.
[1] E.g. consider these images of the moon imaged using Arecibo as the transmitter and Green Bank Telescope as the receiver https://sservi.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/craters2l...