Scientific American: “Arecibo’s Collapse sends Dire Warning to Other Aging Observatories”

Across the decades, researchers used Arecibo’s superlative capabilities to perform one stunning feat of space-science strength after another. These included providing the first piece of evidence for the presence of gravitational waves, as well as detecting the first repeating fast radio burst. The facility played a key role in confirming one of the very first known exoplanets. And it was the source of the Arecibo message, a cosmic communiqué beamed into intergalactic space in 1974 that, at its specific wavelength, briefly outshone the sun.

But as time passed, technology progressed, and the need for new observatories with breakthrough capabilities became clear, Arecibo’s chief funder and steward, the National Science Foundation (NSF), began to perceive the observatory as being past its prime. A 2006 senior review report recommended that unless another entity stepped in to fund it, Arecibo should be decommissioned after 2011. Pressure from the scientific community, as well as from politicians and locals, saved the observatory from this fate, but the NSF has been draining it of annual operational funds and threatening it with decommissioning ever since.

Robin George Andrews

It may sound odd to feel sadness when a inanimate object such as a telescope breaks down, but… I felt sad reading this news as well. After Hubble, I think Arecibo was one of the most iconic telescopes, at least for me. This article explains it very clearly how much it contributed to our understanding of the universe and how its unique capabilities are hard to replace by other existing radio telescopes. I am mostly worried about the gap left in planetary defense, where precise Arecibo measurements helped narrow down the orbits of near-Earth asteroids in order to more accurately predict the probabilities of a future Earth impact. And with rapidly increasing numbers of artificial satellites in orbit, I expect that tracking potentially hazardous asteroids will become more difficult from the ground.

Arecibo Observatory, in operation during its better days, with the Milky Way overhead. Credit: University of Central Florida

And, if the torturous road to build the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s long delayed successor, has thought us something, it that rebuilding such unique instruments can be much harder than originally planned. In Arecibo’s case, this may depend primarily on allocation of funds by the US congress, a process that has stalled many space initiatives. Hopefully someone will find the time and willpower to push this one through, despite the current political turmoil in the Unites States.

In astronomy, we are right at that moment, that sort of inflection point, where we have to make a very clear decision about world leadership and what the benefits to the U.S. are of being a world leader in a field like this, he says. Where the money goes is a reflection of values. Considering the complicated saga of Arecibo, then, what Americans are really confronting is a fundamental question of what sort of country they wish the U.S. to be.