Sad Update, In Our Night-Sky Studies: Arecibo Is Offline. Damaged. We Re-Run One -- On The Chinese Successor To It -- From A Few Septembers Ago.

This is particularly tough news -- given that significant new funds were needed, just to keep it running, before the accident. NPR reports that it is uncertain when -- or whether -- the repairs will get underway. Thus:

". . .A broken cable at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory has torn a gaping 100-foot hole in the dish of one of the largest radio telescopes in the world, taking the instrument offline until repairs can be made.

Arecibo's massive reflector dish, which is built inside a sinkhole in northern Puerto Rico, was damaged when a 3-inch diameter support cable unexpectedly snapped before dawn on Monday, according to the University of Central Florida, which manages the observatory. . . ."

This may well mean that the below dish, on the opposite side of the planet, becomes the default world standard source -- as rebuilding will be daunting now, on the island of Puerto Rico. Sad -- but true. See below.

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Dateline: 09.11.2019 -- We learned overnight, that China's vast FAST dish is fully powered up, and has collected over 100 so-called "fast radio burst" pulses, from an already well-known interstellar object cataloged as FRB121102. As that data gets crunched, we will re-run our seminal post on this, the successor to Arecibo, this afternoon. [I am consciously choosing to talk about anything other than what happened on this day in 2001. Not to disrespect anyone -- but simply to say. . . it is time to move on. Move forward. Let the past, be the past. So. . . onward.]

Dateline: 12.21.2017 -- I was going to wait until Christmas morning to post this, but I suddenly feel a need to more promptly remind that all of our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico could use your charity and help, during this season of giving. . . .

And so could that grand old dish located on the island. Just a thought.

Now (as I had originally planned for Christmas morning, here), I will simply rerun one from about one and a quarter years past, as China has clearly taken the lead on "big dish" time -- we are all sitting under the same big night skies:

It seems that -- for me -- space science is lately filling the void of the slow news trickle, out of Kenilworth. For we know nature simply abhors a vacuum. And this latest piece of news is anything but that. Smile.

Eclipsing Arecibo (in Puerto Rico) in dish diameter (nearly doubling it) -- and completely blowing it away in overall sky coverage -- this is an engineering marvel.

It positively buries Arecibo -- on sky coverage because, as opposed to being fixed into the mountain-side, this Chinese FAST radio dish can "gimbal" almost 40 degrees, in any direction by altering the shape of its parabolic dish's curve -- thus covering a much wider swath of sky. [But as we all remember from Billy Bob Thornton in Armageddon, it is "a big a$$ sky. . . ."]

In any event, this stretches our ability to look back in time, to much closer to when the Universe was first born. Courtesy my lovely eldest daughter, via National Public Radio:

. . . .Xinhua reports the telescope cost $180 million, and displaced 8,000 people from their homes to create the necessary 3-mile radius of radio silence around the facility. It will be used for "observation of pulsars as well as exploration of interstellar elements. . . ."



[FAST will also be used to search for] interstellar communication signals, [which] could be more simply referred to as searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life. "In theory, if there is civilization in outer space, the radio signal it sends will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar ... is approaching us," Qian told Chinese state media. . . .

Indeed. [And perhaps one day, at least possibly, we might -- with this device -- hear a signal. One that might suggest we are not alone in this Universe. I firmly believe we are not -- but as a scientist -- I'd like even just a small hint, of some proof of that idea. That is also why I'll be monitoring the Oumuamu news, out of Chile and China this afternoon.] Be excellent to one another -- for at least for now -- we are all we know we have.

नमस्ते