General > General Technical Chat

The end of the line for the Arecibo radio telescope

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David Hess:
I was chatting with someone on IRC and they said that someone at Arecibo Tweeted that since the initial damage, they could hear strands of the cables breaking every few minutes.

aseok:
observatory collapsed on dish.

jogri:

--- Quote from: LaserSteve on December 01, 2020, 05:39:06 pm ---Aw Crap Squared...

Rebuild It!

How many other of our great infrastructure facilities are now ticking away at failure?

Steve

--- End quote ---

Well, if you want to rebuild it you'd probably have to disassemble almost the entire dish and remove the towers with their foundations... The gregorian dome was assembled where the dish is now and then winched up, so you can't even save the remainder of the dish as you need the space to assemble the dome.

And call me a pessimist if you must, but imo almost all infrastructure suffers from a lack of maintenance: The budget is either too small from the beginning or the costs explode, so you have to "save money" somewhere-> you cut back on maintenance as it doesn't mean directly firing people (bad PR). And then you just give yourself a pat on the back for being a genius and blame others for not giving you money if it fails (hopefully when you are long gone and another sucker has your job).

I wouldn't be surprised if such occurences become the norm in a few years, quite a lot of the stuff that was build in the 60s and 70s is already starting to fail... Here in germany, nearly 15% of all highway bridges are classified as "dilapidated". And that is certainly not going to get better anytime soon.

edy:


The death star suffered the same fate.... but not from lack of maintenance.

tom66:
RIP.  Looks like they were right to not attempt to repair it, it was truly well past safe limits.

Rebuilding is surely the only option now but what is the likelihood of that?

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