[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
> 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.
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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.
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.