Sounds to me like they have ignored preventative maintenance on the telescope for quite some time.
To have two cables break in such a short period of time tells me that they have not inspected the cables in a long time or have ignored degradation in the cables found during inspections.
If you have performed periodic inspections cable breaks do not catch you by surprise.
After the first break all of the other cables should have been inspected ASAP. If they found any other cable was degraded the load on that cable should have been removed immediately.
if they are smarter than us, they will not respond
And they were so close too.
This was the world largest scope until Chinese build larger in 2016. I wander, if this is just coincidence.
I read on another interwebs site that the damage was due to poor maintenance.
Turns out all the far far away space civilizations are giving us the silent treatment.
As cool as that telescope is, it is confined to a very narrow fixed band of the sky.
This seems like a perfect time to upgrade the site to a cluster of smaller but highly agile radio telescopes that can use interferometry to gather the same signal from a dramatically larger section of sky.
Perhaps the shutdown means they have found what they were looking for.
When I heard a second cable actually broke (first failure was cable separating from swage) I assumed the end was near for Arecibo.
Aliens.
BS! The JWT is due to be launched soon. Look it up. We don’t need the old ground-based thing there in PR anymore, and since we don’t need it, why the hell should we want it?
What I love about Free Republic is how often our members have personal knowledge of even the most oddball stories.
For both of you to have personal input on something as weird as this is why I spend way too much time on my healthy internet addiction at FreeRepublic.
Thanks gents.