General > General Technical Chat
The end of the line for the Arecibo radio telescope
<< < (8/29) > >>
coppercone2:
drones can put radio charges on the wires, or haul control wires out there, so it falls right in the middle, then you can put a new transmitter on it. you could use the control system of a TOW missile connected to a drone (it is long and safe and light with a cable length of 4km). you can make them like horse shoes that are placed over the wires, and you can put two of them on each end and sequence it so the wire falls down strait rather then being cut and then dragging through the reflectors on the bottom, to minimize damage. or use helicopters to hold the wires after they are cut to bring them off to the side without damaging the reflectors on the bottom. attaching the wire to a helicopter might be dangerous because you don't know how much strain it will get rid of and how it will shake when its cut, it would need alot of slack and a protection to release itself if it tried to yank on the helicopter. the less you screw up the bottom the more economical it would be to rebuild the top part. 
james_s:
I don't understand how it got THAT bad without anyone noticing that failure was imminent. Rust of cables like that doesn't happen overnight. At least it isn't just in my country that so many people defer maintenance until it becomes a huge expensive problem. I know multiple people who kept putting off having the timing belt on their car engine changed until it snapped and destroyed the engine. People do the same thing with oil changes.
Ian.M:
The dish reflector would be totally FUBARed if you dropped the platform onto its center.   Its held up by radial suspension cables under it from the rim, and they'd all whiplash.  Even if the individual panels remained attached, didn't buckle and you could splice the dish suspension cables, after nearly 60 years most of the panel adjustments would be seized, so you'd never get it back in shape.

The best option with any chance of saving most of the installation would probably be a giant airbag with enough helium bladders to make it near neutrally buoyant, winched into place under the platform, and lots of smaller airbags under the middle of the dish emplaced by ROVs and inflated till the radial cables were slack enough not to whiplash.

Emplacing the cutting charges on the platform cables would be challenging using aerial ROVs, but if you have that capability, attaching support lines to the main cables sufficient to stop them falling on the dish would also be possible.
CatalinaWOW:
If we really like the idea of Arecibo we should start surveying where we want to put its replacement, and designing what it should look like.  The existing site might be the answer, in which case figuring out how best to demolish/salvage the existing structure to make way for the future makes sense.  Otherwise it becomes just another one of those pitch experiments where it might be days or decades before the final failure occurs.
coppercone2:
hanging something on it like a chirstmas ornament is much easier then trying to grip cables in any way to support 900 tons even if distributed

can you totally blow that thing to smithereens so it does not destroy the stuff it lands on (really really big boom)? if you can turn it into pop corn. practice for asteroids

you can evacuate the surrounding area and try to blow it up so it goes outwards like a fountain and away from the crater.

this comes to mind, but I am not sure how well it will work on aluminum, but I think if its all bolted together its possible to set it up so it does (I think that is a bangalor pipe filled with explosives). Put a bunch of sticks like that in the shape of a 3d * and it might work? That thing got vaporized. You would need to use shattering explosives (military) not common nice demolition explosives. You could build a replica to test it first on a tower to make sure it is sufficiently disintegrated.


Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod