That’s not to say that huge single-dish radio telescopes have been abandoned altogether. Rather than go to the trouble of building radio telescopes with single, massive dishes, it has become easier and more effective to set up arrays of smaller telescopes working in conjunction, he says. “There’s been a move towards multielement telescopes-constructing large telescopes with lots of small pieces,” Siemion explains. Yet in its later years, the Arecibo telescope began to fall out of favor among many radio astronomers. “It is extraordinary-maybe unprecedented-for a radio telescope to stay as productive as it has for so long,” says Frail, who works at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The Arecibo telescope’s radio observations continued until its collapse in 2020. These planets were announced by astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail in 1992.
Observing the millisecond radio pulsar PSR B1257+12, the giant dish revealed slight deviations in the rapidly-rotating star’s radio pulses, betraying the presence of at least two planets, both just a few times larger than Earth.
In addition to its contributions to SETI, the Arecibo telescope was used to identify the first confirmed exoplanets. That “Arecibo message,” designed by Drake, could be decoded into a simple pixel-art image providing basic information about life on Earth. Besides trying to detect messages, the Arecibo telescope famously sent one of its own in 1974. Siemion explains that much of the Arecibo telescope’s early research centered on studying Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere, but late astronomer Frank Drake pushed for the expansion of its radio capabilities-in part to scan the skies for potential alien signals. “I think it’s probably fair to say that, historically speaking, the Arecibo telescope has been the most important radio telescope for SETI, period,” says Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center. One such area was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. Thanks to its ability to detect faint radio signals, the Arecibo telescope was able to advance many areas of astronomy. The Arecibo telescope was completed in 1963, and for decades, it was the most sensitive radio telescope in the world. The telescope was built into a natural sinkhole in the northwest of Puerto Rico, which offered the perfect geography to accommodate its curved, 305-meter-diameter reflector dish. Still, there’s no doubt that the Arecibo telescope was the flagship instrument of the Arecibo Observatory and what allowed the site to stand out on the global stage. Méndez didn’t expect that the Arecibo telescope would be rebuilt but says he had hoped that the observatory would continue to receive funding for its other on-site instruments. “We were aware that the NSF was going to make a tough decision., but we were expecting a little bit better than that,” says Abel Méndez, a planetary astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Many astronomers were disappointed-but not surprised-by the announcement. Instead the NSF is soliciting proposals from universities or other groups that could establish a new center for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education and outreach at Arecibo with an annual budget of $1 million per year for five years. Likewise, the NSF’s funding plan will not provide “operational support for current scientific infrastructure” at the Arecibo Observatory, such as its 12-meter radio telescope or its Lidar facility. Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF)-which owns and finances the Arecibo Observatory-announced that it would not be funding the telescope’s reconstruction.
PUERTO RICO TELESCOPE SERIES
A series of cable failures caused the telescope’s 817-metric-ton receiver platform to collapse onto the dish below on December 1, 2020, putting the telescope out of commission. The Arecibo telescope-located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico-was the world’s largest single-dish telescope for most of its more than half-century of existence. Nearly two years ago one of the most iconic telescopes in the world came crashing down on itself.
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