Staff salaries and benefits go up from year to year. Meanwhile, the cost of existing observatories is always increasing, primarily because paying people is expensive. ![]() The balance is never stable: New observatories are always being planned, adding new construction and, eventually, operating costs to the agency’s expenses. Maintaining such a balance is particularly challenging for the NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, which devotes more than half of its budget to supporting the operation of observatories. Just like an individual investor, the NSF needs to examine its investments regularly to ensure a healthy balance between those that provide long-term returns (observatories) and those that provide more immediate ones (grants). In 2005, the NSF decided to review its portfolio of observatories and astronomy research grants, which together at the time cost the agency about $190 million a year. Courtesy of Kiriaki XiluriĪrecibo’s inexorable decline began a decade later. The author as an undergraduate summer researcher at the observatory in 1995. I was too young to realize it at the time, but we had come to say goodbye. My abuelo, Joaquín, a tall, angular man whose charisma and elegance had been lost to a series of strokes, was ailing. My father Jack, New York City born and bred, took my two siblings and me to visit his parents in Quebradillas, a few miles west of the city of Arecibo on Puerto Rico’s northwestern coast. I first visited the observatory 35 years ago, when I was 12. For six decades, until its collapse on December 1, 2020, the telescope was an engine of discovery, generating groundbreaking results in studies of our atmosphere, the solar system, and the universe beyond. There, a suite of instruments was installed to collect radio waves reflected off the dish, and sometimes, to bounce them back into the sky. Four hundred and fifty feet up, suspended over the dish’s center by thick cables strung from three cement towers rising hundreds of feet atop the hills, was a 900-ton triangular platform. The telescope’s mirror, a 350-ton, bowl-shaped dish assembled from nearly 40,000 perforated aluminum panels, sat in a natural sinkhole more than three football fields across. ![]() Conceived in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the observatory’s radio telescope was a marvel of American engineering. Our gazing outward and persistent exploration are simply uncovering ourselves in the family of the cosmos.In the backcountry of Puerto Rico, hidden from prying eyes by round, misty hills, sits one of the world’s great astronomical facilities: the Arecibo Observatory. ![]() We are all-all humans, all of those distant stars-made of the same elements, created in the big bang. While we might appear isolated on our small planet, we are part of a greater network, of things unseen, of distant stars, radio bursts, dazzling far off solar systems. Each time we look up, in some way we are making contact with each other, with our past, present, and future. Exploring the cosmos is a way for us to know ourselves. Imagine if we had none of these tools we’ve built to listen for signals, to gaze deeply back in time at the universe as it looked billions of years ago. Um, Has He Read It?Īs a Single Mom, I Wasn’t “Infertile.” I Just Needed Some Sperm.ĬhatGPT Made OpenAI a Powerhouse. What About Gabe Bankman-Fried?Įlon Musk Loves The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So, we’ve sent our surrogates in our stead to explore and built massive telescopes to peer into the vastness that we’ll never visit. ![]() While humanity is space-faring in some way-sure, the International Space Station counts-every time we go to space, we are reminded that we don’t really belong there. Losing Arecibo-or any telescope of this magnitude, or any spacecraft-drives home something I think we tend to forget: Telescopes and spacecraft aren’t just tools.
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