How the Famed Arecibo Telescope Fell—and How it Might Rise Again

requerdanos writes:

How the famed Arecibo telescope fell-and how it might rise again:

The [December 1, 2020] loss [of the Arecibo platform] dismayed scientists worldwide. Although 57 years old, Arecibo was still a scientific trailblazer. Its powerful radar could bounce radio waves off other planets and asteroids, revealing the contours of their surfaces. Other antennas could heat plasma in Earth's upper atmosphere, creating artificial aurorae for study. And for most of Arecibo's life, it was the biggest radio dish in the world, able to sense the faintest emissions, from the metronomic beats of distant stellar beacons called pulsars to the whisper of rarefied gases between galaxies.

The public, familiar with the majestic dish from films such as Contact and GoldenEye, also felt the loss. And it was a bitter blow to the people of Puerto Rico, who embraced hosting the technological marvel. Some 130 people work at the observatory, and many more derive indirect economic benefits from it. Every schoolchild on the island goes on a field trip to see the telescope, and those experiences often lead to science careers, says astrobiologist Abel Mendez of the University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo. With its fall, "Puerto Rico loses much more than any other place," he says.

[...] Meanwhile, astronomers are looking to the future. "First we mourned, then we had a wake, then we got down to work," says Joanna Rankin, an astronomer at the University of Vermont. Together with Arecibo staff, researchers last month delivered a white paper to NSF describing plans for a new $400 million telescope on the same site. Although any rebuilding effort faces major political and financial hurdles, the proposal aims for an instrument with even more dazzling capabilities than the one that was lost. "There's been a remarkable amount of commitment and energy," Rankin says.

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