8/25/2023 0 Comments Arecibo telescope history![]() I was too young to realize it at the time, but we had come to say goodbye.Īrecibo’s inexorable decline began a decade later. My abuelo, Joaquín, a tall, angular man whose charisma and elegance had been lost to a series of strokes, was ailing. My father Jack, New York City born and bred, took my two siblings and me to visit his parents in Quebradillas, a few miles west of the city of Arecibo on Puerto Rico’s northwestern coast. I first visited the observatory 35 years ago, when I was 12. For six decades, until its collapse on December 1, 2020, the telescope was an engine of discovery, generating groundbreaking results in studies of our atmosphere, the solar system, and the universe beyond. There, a suite of instruments was installed to collect radio waves reflected off the dish, and sometimes, to bounce them back into the sky. Four hundred and fifty feet up, suspended over the dish’s center by thick cables strung from three cement towers rising hundreds of feet atop the hills, was a 900-ton triangular platform. The telescope’s mirror, a 350-ton, bowl-shaped dish assembled from nearly 40,000 perforated aluminum panels, sat in a natural sinkhole more than three football fields across. ![]() ![]() Conceived in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the observatory’s radio telescope was a marvel of American engineering. In the backcountry of Puerto Rico, hidden from prying eyes by round, misty hills, sits one of the world’s great astronomical facilities: the Arecibo Observatory.
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