I hadn't realized that it got original construction funding from DoD in connection with ballistic missile defense. If that source of money isn't there for a rebuild, I duná Žno, might need a bake sale. I guess we got along for quite a while with just one 300 meter dish for a planet. Now there's a 500 meter dish. Maybe that's enough? Next one on moon? Nice craters there. No atmosphere. How often does stuff hit the moon these days?
I'm sure the issue of salt corrosion is being investigated on cables and fittings. Personal experience with salt on the island, and sticking something up high is a great way to collect more. In any case, it could be built stronger if that path were chosen.
Less often than stuff hits the earth, if one presumes that the atmosphere is a part of the "earth." The atmosphere DOES kinda take care of the small bits though. The Moon would be a WAAAY better place to put the observatory, except for the "getting all of the stuff up there" part..... Holes would be super easy to patch, and there are fewer hurricanes..... Salt isn't as big a problem either.
Little holes (depending on shortest wavelength being observed) don't need to be patched. Significantly larger ones, but taking out only a tiny fraction of the reflector area, may well not be worth patching, if the adjacent reflector surface is not distorted.
One design: Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) on the Far-Side of the Moon | NASA Is relatively light for being wire mesh. Wavelengths longer than 10 m. Collecting 'moonbeams' with Arecibo II would involve thousands of tons sent. Ranks somewhere between 'unlikely' and 'lunacy'.
For frequencies 30MHz and lower, which are problematic down here on earth due to our ionosphere, mentioned in the article, and from human-generated "pollution". This range does not overlap the spectrum observed by the Arecibo telescope, 300 MHz - 10 GHz, so wouldn't be any sort of replacement for it.
Drone footage shows the shocking collapse of the Arecibo Observatory Shocking to watch the video of the collapse.
Link on NSF site: Arecibo News Media | National Science Foundation Needs script permissions granted to www.nsf.gov, script and frame permissions to players.brightcove.net, and XHR to edge.api.brightcove.com and some akamaihd.net and boltdns.net domains. Then there is even a link to download it. It's a simple 56 MB mp4 video, once you've waded through all that nonsense to get there.
It is amazing that the drone captured a close up video of the cable right when it decided to snap. Then the drone operator was smart enough to pan over to capture the platform collapsing. I wonder if the cable was making a groaning 'I'm about to break' noise beforehand.
Considering that they were doing hourly inspections by drone, I suspect it was emitting such signs for quite some time.
Space radar as a means to detect and characterize asteroids etc. heading towards earth may be picked up as a task by US Space Force. There are several optical telescopes doing this, but they do not see everything.
If they were expecting this outcome they should have run in the big cranes and cable runners my guess is running new cable would have been cheaper than reconstruction they could have supported the middle platform via crane then relieved tension on the old cabling and reloomed at their leasure things like this are done relatively often in non-remote areas, gotta wonder...
