General > General Technical Chat
The end of the line for the Arecibo radio telescope
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0culus:
Not sure what you're getting at, but Arecibo definitely had military applications in it's early life.
CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: jmelson on December 03, 2020, 02:18:10 am ---
--- Quote from: jogri on December 02, 2020, 02:02:24 pm ---
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.

--- End quote ---
It has actually been going on for quite some time.  I work in the basic nuclear science area.  When I got started, there were ion accelerators all over the place.  Now, a whole bunch of them have been shut down, or available only to commercial customers, etc.  So, the old cyclotron at Oak Ridge national lab was shut down, then the Van de Graff there was shut down (highest voltage Van de Graff in the world, 50 MV), the 88" cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley Labs was made only available to cash customers, right now the superconducting cyclotrons at MSU are being shut down and scrapped.  A bunch of other facilities have also been shut down.  All due to a VASTLY shrinking science budget in the US.

Jon

--- End quote ---

While I am generally in favor of research spending, and do think there is still good science to be done at a facility like Arecibo was, and could be again, not all facilities need to continue.  While I am sure there are uses for them today, Van de Graff generators and cyclotrons are the doddering old grandparents of the high energy particle accelerators at CERN.  While we can be fond of them it is somewhat like railing against the decommissioning of an old 400 kHz oscilloscope or a seventy five pound signal generator that can hit 950 MHz on a good day.

msuffidy:
Well they saved some money on the demo. At least it ripped out ALL the cables somehow and no buildings were destroyed. If they are really interested they could just rebuild something like it there as it is an escavated site with maybe reusable towers.
LaserSteve:
What we just lost was the high power transmit waveguide, two independent transmit feeds, a variable power splitter and part of the
Dish. As well as the astronomy feed horns. The 430 Mhz transmitter is in the building on the hill.
While Arecibo had seven receive feeds, it was also a dual beam radar, both  the Gregorian and the linear array could be used at the same time if desired.

 Arecibo had six auxiliary feedhorns for 430 Mhz receive, More often the VLA / Deep Space networks / other telescopes were used as multiple parallel receive sites , giving the asteroid network the benefits of a phased array and synthetic aperture.  Goldstone has an eight gigahertz transmitter, but is not as available as Arecibo was.

So not only could it transmit, it was a seven pixel imager by itself.

Contrary to popular belief, it could also scan in a limited manor by moving the feeds. and the cables had active tensioning.

In other words, the site was more capable then one might think.
coppercone2:

--- Quote from: jogri on December 02, 2020, 02:02:24 pm ---
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.

--- End quote ---

it no longer needs to move NATO around in a emergency. Friendly oil relations with russia are sure to prevent an invasion now (probobly part of the reason)

I kinda wonder what the hell will happen if there is WW3 in say 30 years when all the stuff is really falling apart. Whoever has more amphibious vehicles and mobile bridges wins? minor blitzkrieg repeat with whoever has more light vehicles? (if you don't know, nazi tanks only started getting beefy into the middle of the war). You used to be able to discourage that because you could put alot of nasty equipment into the right places at a quick notice. Not sure if they will be able to give the same kind of value to stuff made with the air mobility craze in the modern military (so we can send stuff to the desert). I think it all assumes that no one is going to figure out how to make something heavy scary again (new armor). There does seem to be a sizable amount of people that suggest tanks are not going to be super bypassed by modern equipment as much as we think, so politicians could be making the wrong call based on bad information when it comes to maintaining those sorts of things (from the sounds of it though, it will bring upon a gigantic argument).
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