Wednesday, August 16, 2023

The Last Days of Arecibo

The Arecibo Observatory is no more. It officially closed its doors on August 14. There were plans to turn it into a science education centre, but funding for that has not been approved.

Nature has an article about the last days of the observatory. It's a sad article though it does mention some plans that in the long-term may result in science being done there again.  

The observatory’s main attraction — a 305-metre-wide dish that was responsible for, among other things, studying near-Earth asteroids, discovering exoplanets and observing gravitational waves — was destroyed in 2020 when some support cables snapped following years of delayed maintenance. In 2022, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which runs the facility, announced it would not rebuild the dish, citing community recommendations to put the agency’s limited budget into other, newer astronomical facilities. Instead, the NSF said it would convert the observatory into the Arecibo Center for STEM Education and Research (ACSER).

Under this plan, the agency would award between US$1 million and $3 million per year to an institution to manage the centre on a day-to-day basis. Before the telescope's collapse, the NSF was contributing $7.5 million annually to Arecibo, and management of the site was led by the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

When calling for proposals to manage ACSER, the NSF projected that the centre might open this year. But Monya Ruffin, deputy director of the NSF’s Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings Division, now says that the agency hopes to “make an award in 2023”.

Now the world's largest radio telescope is a 500-metre dish in China. Other even larger telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Arrary, are under construction. 

No comments: