Arecibo (radio telescope) is lost

L8APEX

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After having 2 cables fail they do not think they can safely repair the facility, and it is likely going to have a spectacular cascading failure if they do not try a controlled demolition.
We have lost one of our best tools for studying space and it is truly a sad day.

Arecibo radio telescope, an icon of astronomy, is lost | Space

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CobraBob

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That's really bad news for the U.S. Wonder if they'll replace it, or big one bigger to surpass China's.
 

GNBRETT

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So were not gonna find ET now? Thats disappointing..... That really blows cause that place was on my bucket list to see. Now it will just be some overgrown dish in the mountains now smh. That telescope has been in many movies, what a shame.

SETI is lost......
 

03Sssnake

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Gpcalero

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Boy, 2020 sucks huh? Another star lost. I loved him in Golden Eye

Posts and likes are not mine.

Haha, I was thinking the same thing. I thought the radio dish was really cool in the movie. Just watched it a couple of weeks ago lol. Sad to see.
 

L8APEX

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It's not so much the SETI program that has me sad, It's that Arecibo was our main tool for figuring out exactly if any NEO (near earth objects) were on course to actually hit the Earth.
Ultimately it would be the observations from Arecibo in the ~month before impact that would give us the exact location of where the impact would occur on the earth.
Hurricane Maria and the recent nearby earthquakes along with age (57 years since complete, 59 since start) and the salty fog of the area did her in.

WEBAreciboDishDamage__1_.jpg


2020_11_07_12_42_16.jpg


original.jpg


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L8APEX

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At 8am local time this morning, the 900-ton instrument platform came crashing down. Apparently since Thanksgiving they were losing roughly on cable a day.
No pictures yet, but no one was hurt. It's just a very sad day to lose such a valuable/powerful tool.

Unlike the 500m radio antenna in China that recently surpassed Arecibo as the largest in the world, Arecibo could actively send radar waves at objects. That's why they used it to send the SETI message. The Chinese telescope is passive and cannot be modified to accommodate active hardware.

Edit, some pictures are leaking
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98 svt

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^ or goldeneye on n64


We used to play the Player vs Player on Golden Eye, and we would use grenade launchers only. Hahaha I miss those drunken days. Watching the split screen as the opposing player turned around to see it coming at them... and here comes the BOOM!
 

patc84

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We used to play the Player vs Player on Golden Eye, and we would use grenade launchers only. Hahaha I miss those drunken days. Watching the split screen as the opposing player turned around to see it coming at them... and here comes the BOOM!


yup, def miss that game.

mutliplayer was legit.
 

James Snover

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The loss of this facility is not that big a deal. It had many drawbacks, least of all it could only look where Earth was facing, it could not be steered. There's a new thing now, in radio astronomy called "Very Long Baseline Interferometry," which adds signals from telescopes all across the planet, allowing a virtual dish size equal to the diameter of the entire planet. That is just getting into the mainstream, and it's going to be huge.

Arrecibo was an important tool of its day, but time and ingenuity have passed it up, about 15 years ago.
 
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72MachOne99GT

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You guys should all know Perfect Dark for 64 blew Goldeneye away... as it should have as an indirect sequel.
 

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