Arecibo Observatory Totally Explained

Everything about Arecibo Radio Telescope totally explained

The Arecibo Observatory (ah-re-SEE-boh) is a very sensitive radio telescope located approximately south-southwest from the town of Arecibo in Puerto Rico. It is operated by Cornell University under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The observatory works as the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) although both names are officially used to refer to it. NAIC more properly refers to the organization that runs both the observatory and associated offices at Cornell University.
The observatory's 305 m radio telescope is the largest single-aperture telescope (cf. multiple aperture telescope) ever constructed. It carries out three major areas of research: radio astronomy, aeronomy (using both the 305 m telescope and the observatory's lidar facility), and radar astronomy observations of solar system objects. Usage of the telescope is gained by submitting proposals to the observatory, which are evaluated by an independent board of referees.
The telescope is visually distinctive and has been used in the filming of two notable motion pictures: as the villain's antenna in the James Bond movie GoldenEye and as itself in the film Contact. The telescope received additional international recognition in 1999 when it began to collect data for the SETI@home project.

General information

The Arecibo telescope is distinguished by its enormous size: the main collecting dish is 305 m in diameter, constructed inside the depression left by a karst sinkhole. The dish is the largest curved focusing dish on Earth, giving Arecibo the largest electromagnetic-wave gathering capacity. The Arecibo telescope's dish surface is made of 38,778 perforated aluminum panels, each measuring about 1m by 2m (3ft by 6ft), supported by a mesh of steel cables.
It is a spherical reflector (as opposed to a parabolic reflector). This form is due to the method used to aim the telescope: the telescope's dish is fixed in place, but the receiver at its focal point is repositioned to intercept signals reflected from different directions by the spherical dish surface. The receiver is located on a 900-ton platform which is suspended 150 m (500 ft) in the air above the dish by 18 cables running from three reinforced concrete towers, one of which is 110 m (365 ft) high and the other two of which are 80 m (265 ft) high (the tops of the three towers are at the same elevation). The platform has a 93 m long rotating bow-shaped track called the azimuth arm on which receiving antennas, secondary and tertiary reflectors are mounted. This allows the telescope to observe any region of the sky within a forty degree cone of visibility about the local zenith (between -1 and 38 degrees of declination). Puerto Rico's location near the equator allows Arecibo to view all of the planets in the solar system, though the round trip light time to objects beyond Saturn is longer than the time the telescope can track it, preventing radar observations of more distant objects.

Design and architecture

The construction of the Arecibo telescope was initiated by Professor William E. Gordon of Cornell University, who originally intended to use it for the study of Earth's ionosphere. Originally, a fixed parabolic reflector was envisioned, pointing in a fixed direction with a 150 m (500 ft) tower to hold equipment at the focus. This design would have had a very limited use for other potential areas of research, such as planetary science and radio astronomy, which require the ability to point at different positions in the sky and to track those positions for an extended period as Earth rotates. Ward Low of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) pointed out this flaw, and put Gordon in touch with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory (AFCRL) in Boston, Massachusetts where a group headed by Phil Blacksmith was working on spherical reflectors and another group was studying the propagation of radio waves in and through the upper atmosphere. Cornell University proposed the project to ARPA in the summer of 1958 and a contract was signed between the AFCRL and the University in November of 1959. Cornell University published a request for proposals (RFP) asking for a design to support a feed moving along a spherical surface above the stationary reflector. The RFP suggested a tripod or a tower in the center to support the feed. George Doundoulakis, director of research for the antenna design company General Bronze Corp in Garden City, N.Y. received the RFP from Cornell and studied it with his brother, Helias Doundoulakis, a civil engineer.
   The two brothers thought of a more efficient way to suspend the feed, and finally designed the cable suspension system that was used in final construction. The U.S. Patent office granted Helias Doundoulakis a patent on this approach.
   Construction began in the summer of 1960, with the official opening taking place on November 1, 1963. As the primary dish is spherical, its focus is along a line rather than at a single point (as would be the case for a parabolic reflector), thus complicated 'line feeds' had to be used to carry out observations. Each line feed covered a narrow frequency band (2-5% of the center frequency of the band) and a limited number of line feeds could be used at any one time, limiting the flexibility of the telescope.
   The telescope has undergone several significant upgrades over its lifespan. The first major upgrade was in 1974 when a high precision surface was added for the current reflector. In 1997 a Gregorian reflector system was installed, incorporating secondary and tertiary reflectors to focus the radio waves at a single point. This allowed the installation of a suite of receivers, covering the whole 1-10 GHz range, that could be easily moved onto the focal point, giving Arecibo a flexibility it hadn't previously possessed. At the same time a ground screen was installed around the perimeter to prevent receivers from sensing the ground (which, due to its temperature, would make observations less sensitive) and a more powerful transmitter was installed.

Discoveries

Many significant scientific discoveries have been made using The Arecibo telescope. On 7 April 1964, shortly after its inauguration, Gordon H. Pettengill's team used it to determine that the rotation rate of Mercury wasn't 88 days, as previously thought, but only 59 days. In 1968, the discovery of the periodicity of the Crab Pulsar (33 milliseconds) by Lovelace and others provided the first solid evidence that neutron stars exist in the Universe. In 1974 Hulse and Taylor discovered the first binary pulsar PSR B1913+16, for which they were later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1982, the first millisecond pulsar, PSR J1937+21, was discovered by Don Backer, Shri Kulkarni and others. This object spins 642 times per second, and it was until 2005 the fastest-spinning pulsar known.
In August 1989, the observatory directly imaged an asteroid for the first time in history: asteroid 4769 Castalia. The following year, Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan made the discovery of pulsar PSR B1257+12, which later led him to discover its three orbiting planets (and a possible comet). These were the first extra-solar planets ever discovered. In 1994, John Harmon used the Arecibo radio telescope to map the distribution of ice in the poles of Mercury.
In January 2008, detection of prebiotic molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide were reported from Arecibo Observatory radio spectroscopy measurements of the distant starburst galaxy Arp 220.

Other usage

The telescope also had military intelligence uses, for example locating Soviet radar installations by detecting their signals bouncing back off the Moon. Arecibo is also the source of data for the SETI@home distributed computing project put forward by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and was used for the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix observations.
In 1974, the Arecibo message, an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life, was transmitted from the radio telescope toward the globular cluster M13, about 25,000 light-years away. The 1,679 bit pattern of 1s and 0s defined a 23 by 73 pixel bitmap image that included numbers, stick figures, chemical formulas, and a crude image of the telescope itself.
Terrestrial aeronomy experiments include the controversial (Ruiz 1998) Coqui 2 experiment (Friedlander 1997).

Funding issues

A report by the division of Astronomical Sciences of the National Science Foundation, made public on 2006-11-03, recommended substantially decreased astronomy funding for Arecibo Observatory, ramping down from USD 10.5M in 2007 to USD 4M in 2011.. If other sources of funding can't be obtained, this would mean the closure of the observatory. The report also advised that 80% of the observation time be allocated to the surveys already in progress, reducing the time available for other scientific work. NASA gradually eliminated its share of the planetary radar funding at Arecibo from 2001-2006.
   Contributions by the government of Puerto Rico may be one way to help fill the funding gap, but are controversial and uncertain. At town hall meetings about the potential closure, Puerto Rico Senate President Kenneth McClintock announced an initial local appropriation of $3 million during fiscal year 2008 to fund a major maintenance project to restore the three pillars from which the antenna platform is suspended to their original condition, pending inclusion in the territorial government's next bond issue. The appropriation would be the first time that the islands' government contributes financially to the operation of a federal installation. However, New Progressive Party president and Arecibo District Sen. Pedro Rosselló announced on September 11, 2007 that he'll oppose the bond issue favored by McClintock. The bond authorization, with the $3 million appropriation, was approved by the Senate of Puerto Rico on November 14, 2007, the first day of a special session called by Gov. Acevedo Vilá.
   Rep. José E. Serrano, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee, has asked the National Science Foundation to keep Arecibo in operation in a letter released on September 19, 2007. Language similar to that in the September 19 letter was included in the FY'08 omnibus spending bill.
   In October, 2007, Puerto Rico's non-voting delegate in Congress, Resident Commissioner Luis Fortuño, along with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), filed legislation to assure the continued operation of the Arecibo facility. A similar bill was filed in the United States Senate in April, 2008 by the junior Senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
   As the Arecibo facility is owned by the United States, and administered as a national facility by the NAIC, direct donations by private or corporate donors can't be made. However, as a non-profit, non-government institution,Cornell University will accept contributions on behalf of Arecibo Observatory. It has been suggested by at least one member of the NAIC staff that Google purchase advertising space on the dish as one means of securing additional non-government funds. As of early 2008, no 'anchor' donors (government, non-profit, nor scientific) have publicly stepped forward to provide funding for the observatory nor its radar system.
   Recently, in an open letter to researchers, the NSF clarified the status of the budget issue for NAIC, stating that the present plan, if implemented, may hit the targeted budgetary revision. No mention of private funding was made. However, it need be noted that the NSF is undertaking studies to mothball, or deconstruct the facility and return it to its natural setting in the event that the budget target isn't achieved. In November 2007, The Planetary Society urged Congress to prevent the Arecibo Observatory from closing due to insufficient funds, since the radar contributes heavily to the accuracy of asteroid impact prediction, and they believe continued operation will reduce the cost of mitigation (that is, deflection of NEA on collision to Earth), should that be necessary. Note that Arecibo itself can't deflect an asteroid - however with the potential of Arecibo measuring many NEA orbits more precisely, fewer asteroids will need to be investigated by other, more expensive, means such as spacecraft. (For comparison, Arecibo's total annual budget is currently $12.5M/year, whereas Discovery-class space missions cost in excess of $400M each, albeit commonly spread out over a decade or more).

Arecibo in popular culture

Arecibo Observatory was used as a filming location in the final scene of the James Bond movie GoldenEye. In the film, the villain Alec Trevelyan used a similar dish in Cuba to communicate with a Russian satellite to fire an electromagnetic pulse at London (the use of Arecibo to communicate with an earth-orbiting satellite is nonsensical from a technical standpoint). The dish and the ground below it were covered with water to conceal it as a lake. Additionally, the two main characters, Agents 007 and 006, fight on the antenna platform in the final scenes of the movie. The "Cradle" stage in the video game GoldenEye 007 also depicts this climactic scene.
   The film Contact features Arecibo in a more realistic way, as main character Ellie Arroway uses the facility as part of a SETI project.
   In the X-Files episode "Little Green Men", Fox Mulder was sent to the Arecibo Observatory by a U.S. Senator because contact had been made with extraterrestrial life. As was often the case in the series, Mulder was forced to escape as U.S. government military forces arrived, without taking definitive proof of alien contact with him.
   The observatory is briefly mentioned in the 1970 Doctor Who adventure "The Ambassadors of Death".
   The Arecibo Observatory was also featured in the film Species, as the main setting for the James Gunn novel The Listeners (1972), and as a prominent element in the Mary Doria Russell novel The Sparrow (1996). It was also featured in a segment of a Reading Rainbow episode.
   The aliens in the BBC radio serial Space Force (1984) contact Earth after receiving the Arecibo message. One of the characters in the episode "The Voice from Nowhere" says that the Arecibo Observatory was closed down and dismantled.
   Songwriter and author Jimmy Buffett mentions the "giant telescope" in his book Where Is Joe Merchant?, and in the lyrics to the song "Desdemona's Building A Rocket Ship". In both, a talented baker and former backup singer named Desdemona has a tryst with one of the workers "under the giant telescope", and begins receiving telepathic messages from the Pleiades, telling her to build a spaceship and "come home".
   The dark ambient artist Brian "Lustmord" Williams did an album under the name of Arecibo. The album was titled Trans Plutonian Transmissions. Many of the sounds on Trans Plutonian Transmissions are derived from cosmological activity as recorded by NASA's deep space network.

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