Save the Arecibo Observatory

[MilesColtrane]

Funding is being cut. They plan to mothball it if nobody else comes up with the cheddar.

Should be worth the money, if only for it's ability to track and warn of asteroid threats to Earth.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/arecibo_letter.php

[lepus]

1. arecibo is out for a number of reasons.

It cannot be pointed other than electronically, that means a loss of power that is a sine function of whatever it looks at in the line of sight. It is also limited in what frequencies it can pick up.

The very long baseline telescopes pretty much made it defunct a long time ago.

BTW, a radio telescope can only see objects that emit energy in the spectrums that it was designed to look in. Asteroids do not emit RF.

[Wilms]

2. The letter is saying Arecibo

"Not until the year 2020 will any other telescope even have a chance to surpass Arecibo. If the Square Kilometer Array (to be located in South Africa or Australia) gets all of its funding on time, a decade-long gap without the use of Arecibo (or any comparable telescope) will still plague astronomic, planetary, and atmospheric research."


It also mentions radar as the means by which it tracks asteroids.