Better Days
Just before eight in the morning on December 1st of last year, Ada Monzón was at the Guaynabo studios of WAPA, a television station in Puerto Rico, preparing to give a weather update, when she got a text from a friend. Jonathan Friedman, an aeronomer who lives near the Arecibo Observatory, about an hour and a half from San Juan, had sent her a photo, taken from his sister-in-law’s back yard, of the brilliant blue Caribbean sky and the green, heavily forested limestone hills. In the picture, a thin cloud of dust hovered just above the tree line; the image was notable not for what it showed but for what was missing. On a normal day—on any day before that one, in fact—a shot from that back yard would have captured Arecibo’s nine-hundred-ton radio-telescope platform, with its massive Gregorian dome, floating improbably over the valley, suspended from cables five hundred feet above the ground. Accompanying the photo was Friedman’s message, which read, simply, “Se cayó ”—“It fell.”
Every year since Arecibo’s completion, in 1963, hundreds of researchers from around the world had taken turns pointing the radio telescope toward the sky to glean the secrets of the universe. It had played a role in the fields of radio astronomy and atmospheric, climate, and planetary science, as well as in the search for exoplanets and the study of near-Earth asteroids that, were they to collide with our planet, could end life as we know it. There were even biologists working at Arecibo, studying how plant life developed in the dim light beneath the telescope’s porous dish.
Eideard 
ALAS000AND IT EVER SERVED AS FORGROUND AND BACKGROUND FOR A 007 MOVIE-!
Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
THINGS DO DETERIATE TO A POINT WHERE IT WOULD TAKE A MAJOR REBUILDING TO SAVE IT.
Organizations Partner to Rescue Petabytes of Data from the Arecibo Observatory https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/04/21/organizations-partner-to-rescue-petabytes-of-data-from-the-arecibo-observatory/
Quantum Astronomy Could Create Telescopes Hundreds of Kilometers Wide : Astronomers hope to use innovations from the subatomic world to construct breathtakingly large arrays of optical observatories (Scientific American) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-astronomy-could-create-telescopes-hundreds-of-kilometers-wide/
In Chile’s dry Atacama Desert, stargazers are scanning the clear night skies to detect the existence of life on other planets and study so-called “dark energy,” a mysterious cosmic force thought to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Central to the race to peer into distant worlds is the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), a $1.8 billion complex being built at the Las Campanas observatory and which will have a resolution 10 times higher than the Hubble space telescope.
The telescope, expected to begin operation by the end of the decade, will compete with the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope — located further north in the same desert — as well as the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) being built in Hawaii.
“This new generation of giant telescopes is aimed precisely at detecting life on other planets and to determine the origin of dark energy,” said Leopoldo Infante, director of the Las Campanas observatory. https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/americas/chile-atacama-desert-scli-intl-scn/index.html
Arecibo’s Legacy Lives On, a Year After Its Collapse : Space scientists Abel Méndez, Génesis Ferrer, and Arianna Colón Cesaní spoke with Motherboard about the incalculable impact of Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory. https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vdnx/arecibos-legacy-lives-on-a-year-after-its-collapse
“Arecibo observatory scientists help unravel surprise asteroid mystery
A team from the observatory publish their findings ahead of Asteroid Day, a U.N. designation aimed at increasing awareness about the threats some asteroids pose.” https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/956942
“…Zambrano-Marin is now inspecting the data collected through Arecibo’s Planetary Radar database to continue her research. Although the observatory’s telescope collapsed in 2020, the Planetary Radar team can tap the existing data bank that spans four decades. Science operations continue in the areas of space and atmospheric sciences, and the staff is refurbishing 12-meter antennae to continue with astronomy research.
“We can use new data from other observatories and compare it to the observations we have made here over the past 40 years,” Zambrano-Marin says. “The radar data not only helps confirm information from optical observations, but it can help us identify physical and dynamical characteristics, which in turn could give us insights into appropriate deflection techniques if they were needed to protect the planet.”
“After collapsing into pieces in December 2020, the mighty Arecibo Observatory has a final parting gift for humanity – and it’s a doozy.
Using data collected by Arecibo between December 2017 and December 2019, scientists have released the largest radar-based report on near-Earth asteroids ever published.
The report, published September 22 in The Planetary Science Journal, includes detailed observations of 191 near-Earth asteroids, including nearly 70 that are deemed “potentially hazardous” – that is, large asteroids with orbits that bring them within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) of Earth, or roughly 20 times the average distance between Earth and the Moon.
Fortunately, none of these newly described asteroids pose an immediate threat to Earth; according to NASA, our planet is safe from deadly asteroid impacts for at least the next 100 years.
However, scientists still pay close attention to near-Earth objects like these in case their trajectories happen to shift by some fluke of nature – say, a bump from another asteroid – thereby putting them on a collision course with Earth.
The new report also flagged several asteroids deemed worthy of future study, including an oddball space object called 2017 YE5 – an ultra-rare “equal mass” binary asteroid, made of two nearly identical size rocks that are constantly orbiting one another.” https://www.sciencealert.com/destroyed-observatory-issues-final-asteroid-warning-after-fatal-collapse