And so it begins. A new chapter in the glorious history of giant telescope mismanagement !
Among the western community of astronomers there are also questions about the scientific purpose of the FAST telescope. As part of a recent National Science Foundation review of its facilities, US officials placed the similar Arecibo radio telescope near the bottom of its priorities list.
Yes, but that's only because they're a bunch of feckin' idiots.
While FAST is larger than Arecibo, its effective size is not really 500 meters across because the instrument spends much of its time off zenith. Therefore the effective size is about 400 meters, compared to Arecibo's 300 meters.
Not quite true. FAST deforms its spherical mirror to form a parabola 300 m across. The deformation can be controlled so as to control where the dish is effectively pointing. Arecibo's solution is to use instruments which receive signal only from a ~225 m wide area of the dish, hence moving the instruments controls the pointing.
FAST has some advantage of slightly higher sensitivity* and resolution, but the main gain is that it has twice the sky coverage Arecibo does. But it's much more limited in terms of frequency coverage (by around a factor 3 IIRC). It's not yet known if it will be possible to upgrade this, because the accuracy with which the dish is deformed would need to be improved.
* Caveat - it might be more suited for wide-field surveys, depending on their instrument designs, but Arecibo could be upgraded substantially here.
Arecibo also has the capability to transmit radio waves, making it an effective tool to identify targets such as near-Earth asteroids. FAST is only a passive instrument.
And FAST will likely never have this capability, because radar transmitters are heavy. The deformable dish means FAST have a lightweight platform that can't carry as many instruments as Arecibo can. Arecibo can change instruments literally at the click of a mouse. For FAST this is a much more time-consuming operation.
https://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/08/china-built-the-worlds-largest-telescope-but-has-no-one-to-run-it/
Would you mind explaining the thought processes / manias going into the attempted retirement of Arecibo/NAIC? I'm no astronomer, but it seems to me it's the only instrument of its type capable of certain missions. If the US government won't support it, why not just give it to SRI? Wouldn't be that tough to raise 12 , 15 million a year to keep Arecibo running.
ReplyDeleteSee, for me, the great thing about Arecibo, it was built to be upgraded. Put ever better instruments aboard, keep improving the mesh below, what is wrong with just asking NSF to get out of the way and let someone else fund it?
Oh, I can do better than that.
ReplyDeletehttps://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/RNYEbW4fD3c
Rhys Taylor Heh! Let's stipulate to NSF and its idiocy. SRI seems to this semi-informed observer as the logical heir to Arecibo. If not SRI then a consortium of universities capable and willing to fund and maintain it.
ReplyDeleteThe #Trumpsucks administration is cutting back on every science project they can and making it as frustrating as they can for scientists working in government positions, they want scientists to quit.
ReplyDeleteWell they're in the middle of yet another bloody competition for a cooperative agreement, but word on the street dish is that no-one's allowed to know who's making a bid. Not sure if SRI want to keep it, now that they know the ugly truth about how managing it tends to send everyone on an insane murderous rampage.
ReplyDeleteOnly part of that last sentence is inaccurate.
Juana Leilani Yes... but this one has been building for >10 years. NSF has this chronic misconception that they can save money but not paying anyone. So they don't pay for things like, say, proper maintenance. Or they get one manage to do a job that requires three full-time employees. And too few scientists to manage the observations without driving them all mad. Which, with tiresome predictability, leads to a mismanaged facilty that has far higher expenses and lower output than it needs to. It's not a political party issue, it's a deep-rooted mentality of the NSF that's ever - ever - so close to the classic political tactic of deliberately breaking a system and then claiming it's not working.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese "response": shanghaiist.com - China denies that it's searching for a foreigner to run its giant alien-hunting telescope
ReplyDelete