Posted on 11/20/2020 11:31:37 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
The National Science Foundation announced Thursday that it will close the huge telescope at the renowned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in a blow to scientists worldwide who depend on it to search for planets, asteroids and extraterrestrial life.
The independent, federally funded agency said it’s too dangerous to keep operating the single dish radio telescope — one of the world’s largest — given the significant damage it recently sustained. An auxiliary cable broke in August and tore a 100-foot hole in the reflector dish and damaged the dome above it. Then on Nov. 6, one of the telescope’s main steel cables snapped, leading officials to warn that the entire structure could collapse.
NSF officials noted that even if crews were to repair all the damage, engineers found that the structure would still be unstable in the long term.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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.
Part of the Clinton shift to China was the production of wire rope or steel cable, including elevator cables.
A friend of mine owned a large wire rope manufacturering plant in the US. After China dumped cheap garbage cable on the market and took his customers, they came to my friend and offered to purchase all his manufacturing equipment so they could ship it to China.
He refused to sell to China, but still had to shut down.
All that Chinese made garbage steel cable is now surfacing.
We'd better all hope that Hurricane Maria was just a coincidence, because if the Chinese have the technology to instigate a hurricane to damage the Arecibo dish, the whole world is screwed! Or at least the Caribbean and the SE USA.
</sarc>
Interesting but this telescope saw first light 57 years ago.
That means it’s cables were manufacture probably between 1959 and 1961.
Long time before Clinton unless the cables were replaced during the Clinton era.
Which considering that those cables see a great deal of stress they probably should have been.
Any rigger would tell you that the rig angles on the suspension cables for this telescope is far from ideal.
Yup!
It’s getting noticed by everybody, even people who previously never took any notice of metallurgy.
A mechanic buddy of mine was talking about putting in some stainless steel brake lines, and then he caught himself, and said, “Well, it’s Chinese stainless”. With the obvious inference that Chinese steel is garbage. And let me tell you, this friend of mine is by no means a metallurgist.
I read on another interwebs site that the damage was due to poor maintenance.
I will check with a very close friend of mine who is a retired astro physicist who was in charge of this telescope in Puerto Rico for many years. He retired to my area and we became good friends, getting together at least once a month.
He was also involved in the SETI project.
Turns out all the far far away space civilizations are giving us the silent treatment.
This probably has hit him pretty hard.
Take a good bottle of bourbon with you.
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.
Reminds me of the Bond movie.
He was Director of NSF’s Extra galactic Astronomy and Cosmology Program in the 1990’s. They own the Puerto Rico telescope.
When I heard a second cable actually broke (first failure was cable separating from swage) I assumed the end was near for Arecibo.
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