Wow.
Though the initial reports are reliable, it will take a while for teams to reach the site and assess the extent of the hurricane’s impact, which includes the loss of a smaller, 12-meter dish as well as substantial damage to the main dish. (Find out why this hurricane season has been so catastrophic.)
That 12m dish took a long, long time to bring into operation. Horrible to hear that it's gone after so much effort and so many delays. [It turned out that this was not the case at all - the 12m is still there !]
Because of the storm, a 96-foot line feed antenna—which helps focus, receive, and transmit radio waves—broke in half and fell about 500 feet into the huge dish below, puncturing it in several places, says Pennsylvania State University’s Jim Breakall, who talked with Vazquez.
A fixture of the observatory since 1966, that line feed weighs about ten thousand pounds and is easily visible in images of the telescope as the pointy thing hanging off the platform. It was once used to detect mountains on the surface of Venus, and it is still crucial for studies of the part of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere, says former observatory director Frank Drake, who is also my dad.
“It allows the Arecibo telescope to achieve the most sensitivity of any radar telescope in the world,” Drake says, noting that it’s not clear how much time or money could be needed for repairs. “The end result is that the telescope will not be fully operative for some time at all wavelengths.”
Yikes.
On September 20, Hurricane Maria came ashore as a Category 4 storm and traversed Puerto Rico, flooding towns, toppling bridges, demolishing buildings and blasting the island with winds exceeding 150 miles an hour.
Even now, nearly 48 hours after Maria went through, reports from many parts of the island are devastatingly sparse. Electricity is nonexistent, phone lines are mostly down, and roads are blocked, complicating both communications and rescue operations.
Call me selfish if you wish, but I am really, really glad I decided to leave.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/arecibo-radio-telescope-damaged-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-science/
Just when the ETs are beaming to us....
ReplyDeleteI moved out of Florida after 2004's hurricanes, to a mountain in New Mexico. And my sister moved to Dominican Republic. You make your choices.
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