The Arecibo Telescope was the world’s largest single-aperture telescope for 53 years, until it was surpassed in July 2016 by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou, China. The telescope’s main collecting dish had the shape of a spherical cap 1,000 feet in diameter with an 869-foot radius of curvature. The observatory, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation with partial support from NASA, was managed by Cornell University from its completion in 1963 until 2011. On November 19, 2020, the telescope would be decommissioned and dismantled, with the radio telescope and LIDAR facility remaining operational.
About Arecibo Telescope in brief
The Arecibo Telescope was the world’s largest single-aperture telescope for 53 years, until it was surpassed in July 2016 by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou, China. The telescope’s main collecting dish had the shape of a spherical cap 1,000 feet in diameter with an 869-foot radius of curvature, and was constructed inside a karst sinkhole. The observatory, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation with partial support from NASA, was managed by Cornell University from its completion in 1963 until 2011. In 2018, a consortium led by the University of Central Florida assumed operation of the facility. On November 19, 2020, the telescope would be decommissioned and dismantled, with the radio telescope and LIDAR facility remaining operational. It was damaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and was affected by earthquakes in 2019 and 2020. Two cable breaks, one in August 2020 and a second in November 2020, threatened the structural integrity of the support structure for the suspended platform and damaged the dish. The support structure, antenna, and dome assembly all fell into the dish at 7: 55 a.m. local time on December 1, 2020. It has been listed on the US National Register of Historic Places since 2008. The center was named an IEEE Milestone in 2001. Since 2006, the NSF has reduced its funding commitment to the observatory,. leading academics to push for additional funding support to continue its programs.
This allowed the telescope to observe any region of the sky in a forty-degree cone of visibility about the zenith of local light. The location near Puerto Rico’s Northern Tropic allowed the telescopes to view the planets in the Solar System over the northern half of their orbit. Even at this stage it was clear that the use of radar decoys would be a serious problem at the early stage of the ABM Project, which developed anti-ballistic missile defenses as part of the newly formed ABMPA’s ABM Defender Project. The telescopes’ unique and futuristic design led to several appearances in film, gaming and television productions, such as for the climactic fight scene in the James Bond film GoldenEye. The telescope could track a celestial object for longer than the 2-hour time needed to successfully attack a warhead on long ranges, preventing radar observations of more distant objects of the origins of the late 1950s and 1960s. As a spherical mirror, the reflector’s focus is along a line rather than at one point. The receiver was on an 820-tonne platform suspended 150 m above the dish by 18 cables running from three reinforced concrete towers. The platform had a rotating, bow-shaped track 93 m long, called the azimuth arm, carrying the receiving antennas and secondary and tertiary reflectors. It had three radar transmitters, with effective isotropic radiated powers of 22 TW at 2380 MHz, 3.2 TW at 430 MHz and 200 MW at 47 MHz.
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This page is based on the article Arecibo Telescope published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
