Following the setback caused by the sad (though spectacular) collapse of the Arecibo Observatory telescope earlier this month in Puerto Rico, a plan seems to be emerging to rebuild one of the world’s most recognizable instruments for deep space research.
From Puerto Rico The New Day News reports that Puerto Rican Governor Wanda Vazquez Garced signed an executive order allocating $ 8 million to rebuild the huge monoplate radio telescope. The order also provides for the removal of debris from the Dec. 1 collapse and designates the telescope’s location as a “historic area,” according to the report.
Captured in dramatic images of drones, the observatory’s 900-tonne platform, suspended 150 meters above the 305-meter giant plate, gave way on December 1 when several support cables were broken, causing the platform would fall to the surface of the bottom plate. The observatory had been closed since August due to an initial cable outage. That previous setback provoked an investigation and later plans for a controlled demolition; an operator never had a chance to perform.
Owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States, the Arecibo Observatory entered service in 1963 and for nearly 60 years collected radio data used to make a variety of observations that included the world’s first tests of the existence of exoplanets. The telescope was also integrated into NASA’s search for near-Earth objects.
In his order, Vázquez Garced said the $ 8 million would be used to fund waste disposal for the wreckage of the collapsed telescope, as well as the design of a new radio telescope to replace it. This leaves funding to build a real replacement, a much more costly proposal than the $ 8 million, a matter of future NSF budget priorities, which receives its research allocations from Congress.
For next year, Congressional funding for the SNF currently depends on the fate of the $ 1.4 trillion spending bill that President Donald Trump recently signed – with a series of tentative developments – before returning to Congress to re-introduce it. Science reports that the NSF fund share included in the bill comes with the request that the agency explain its plans for the site. “In particular, lawmakers want to know how NSF will decide whether to build a new observatory and the estimated cost of these facilities,” the report notes.