[time-nuts] The Collapse of Puerto Rico’s Iconic Telescope [April 5th, 2021 New Yorker]

[Tom Clark]

I thought you might enjoy this article, taken from the///_*New Yorker 
Magazine*_ /April 5th, 2021/-- /Tom Clark


  The Collapse of Puerto Rico’s Iconic Telescope

The uncertain future of the Arecibo Observatory, and the end of an era 
in space science.

ByDaniel Alarcón <https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/daniel-alarcon>

March 29, 2021

For more than half a century, the Arecibo Observatory had the world’s 
largest single-aperture telescope.Illustration by Golden Cosmos

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Just before eight in the morning on December 1st of last year, Ada 
Monzón was at the Guaynabo studios of WAPA, a television station in 
Puerto Rico, preparing to give a weather update, when she got a text 
from a friend. Jonathan Friedman, an aeronomer who lives near the 
Arecibo Observatory, about an hour and a half from San Juan, had sent 
her a photo, taken from his sister-in-law’s back yard, of the brilliant 
blue Caribbean sky and the green, heavily forested limestone hills. In 
the picture, a thin cloud of dust hovered just above the tree line; the 
image was notable not for what it showed but for what was missing. On a 
normal day—on any day before that one, in fact—a shot from that back 
yard would have captured Arecibo’s nine-hundred-ton radio-telescope 
platform, with its massive Gregorian dome, floating improbably over the 
valley, suspended from cables five hundred feet above the ground. 
Accompanying the photo was Friedman’s message, which read, simply, “/Se 
cayó/ ”—“It fell.”

Every year since Arecibo’s completion, in 1963, hundreds of researchers 
from around the world had taken turns pointing the radio telescope 
toward the sky to glean the secrets of the universe. It had played a 
role in the fields of radio astronomy and atmospheric, climate, and 
planetary science, as well as in the search for exoplanets and the study 
of near-Earth asteroids that, were they to collide with our planet, 
could end life as we know it. There were even biologists working at 
Arecibo, studying how plant life developed in the dim light beneath the 
telescope’s porous dish.

Monzón, along with thousands of other scientists and radio-astronomy 
enthusiasts for whom Arecibo held a special meaning, had been on high 
alert for weeks, ever since two of its cables had failed, in August and 
in early November. Although the telescope seemed to have survived 
Hurricane Maria, in 2017, without serious damage, the earthquakes that 
followed had perhaps weakened components that were already suffering 
from decades of wear and tear. It was, in many ways, a death foretold. 
Even so, when the inevitable finally occurred, Monzón was stunned.

Monzón is a presence in Puerto Rico, a much beloved and trusted figure, 
as meteorologists sometimes are in places where reporting on extreme 
weather can be a matter of life and death. She’d covered Hurricane Maria 
and its harrowing aftermath, as well as dozens of lesser but still 
dangerous storms and the resulting floods or landslides. She’d done a 
Facebook Live through a magnitude-6.4 earthquake. Still, she told me, 
the end of Arecibo was somehow harder, more personal. “It was 
devastating,” she said. “One of the most difficult moments of my life.” 
Arecibo, she added, “was a place of unity for everyone who loves science 
on this island, and all of us who truly love Puerto Rico.”

For more than half a century, Arecibo was the world’s largest 
single-aperture telescope, its global reputation built on grand 
discoveries that matched its size: from the observatory, the presence of 
ice on the poles of Mercury was first detected, the duration of that 
planet’s rotation was determined, and the surface of Venus was mapped; 
the first binary pulsar, later used to test Einstein’s theory of 
relativity, was found by astronomers working at Arecibo. (They were 
awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1993.)

In 1974, a team led by an astronomer at Cornell University named Frank 
Drake (which included Carl Sagan) put together the Arecibo Message, a 
radio transmission that was beamed to a cluster of stars more than 
twenty-five thousand light-years away. The message was meant to 
celebrate human technological advancement, and, supposedly, to be 
decoded and read by extraterrestrials. Not all radio telescopes can both 
receive and transmit: this was one more way in which Arecibo was 
special. The message itself—a series of bits and squares containing the 
numbers one through ten, the atomic numbers of certain elements, and a 
graphic of a double helix, among other scientific touchstones—was mostly 
symbolic, to mark the occasion of an upgrade to the telescope’s 
capabilities, but it captured the public imagination nonetheless. In 
theory, were any alien life-forms to respond, we earthlings could 
discern their answer at Arecibo.

Each year, more than eighty thousand visitors came to the observatory, 
including tourists from all over the world and twenty thousand Puerto 
Rican schoolchildren, who had their first brush with the cosmos there. 
The 1995 James Bond film “GoldenEye” featured an absurd fight scene that 
was shot at Arecibo, which culminated in Pierce Brosnan’s Bond dropping 
a scowling villain to his death from the suspended platform; two years 
later, in the film “Contact,” Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey 
shared a kiss beneath a starry sky with the Gregorian dome as a 
backdrop. “If you had to tell someone about Puerto Rico,” Monzón told 
me, “you’d say, ‘We have the largest radio telescope in the world,’ and 
they’d say, ‘Oh, sure, Arecibo.’ ”

<https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a25165>“You want me on time, or you 
want me in a turtleneck?”

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Cartoon by Tom Chitty

That December morning at the WAPA studios, Monzón told the production 
team that she had to go on the air right away, and minutes later she was 
standing in front of a weather map, her voice cracking: “Friends, with 
my heart in my hands, I have to inform you that the observatory has 
collapsed.” She bit her lip and shook her head. “We tried to save it 
however we could. And we knew this was a possibility. . . .” She trailed 
off, looked down at the phone in her hand, and stammered that the 
director of the observatory was calling. She answered on air and, for an 
awkward moment, even wandered off camera. Everything was true, she told 
her audience when she returned. It was gone.

The construction of a world-class radio telescope in Puerto Rico was, in 
some ways, an accident of the Cold War. After the Soviet Union launched 
the Sputnik satellite, in 1957, there was a lot of money in Washington 
for big ideas that could showcase American power and technology, 
particularly in space. Enter a Cornell physicist and astronomer named 
William Gordon, a veteran of the Second World War in his early forties, 
who wanted to use radio waves to study the upper atmosphere—something 
that required a giant transmitter and a massive dish. Nothing on this 
scale had ever been done. Radio astronomy was still in its early days; 
Cornell was among the first American universities where it was studied. 
The Advanced Research Projects Agency, created by President Eisenhower, 
funded the project, hoping that it would detect any intercontinental 
ballistic missiles cutting a path across the upper atmosphere.

In order to be useful for planetary study, the telescope had to be 
situated in the tropics, where the planets pass overhead in their 
orbits. Cuba, in the midst of revolution, was not an option. Hawaii and 
the Philippines were too far away. Puerto Rico, which had formalized its 
colonial relationship with the U.S. less than a decade earlier, emerged 
as a possibility, facilitated by a Ph.D. candidate from there who was 
studying at Cornell. The rest, as they say, is history. Gordon, who died 
in 2010, described the rather arbitrary nature of the site-selection 
process in a 1978 interview: “Our civil-engineer man looked at the 
aerial photographs of Puerto Rico and said, ‘Here are a dozen 
possibilities of holes in the ground in roughly the dimensions you 
need.’ And we looked at some and said, ‘Well, that’s too close to a town 
or a city or something.’ Very, very quickly he reduced it to three, and 
he and I went down and looked at them and picked one.”

The one that they picked was a half-hour drive into the hills from 
Arecibo, a town of about seventy thousand, with a harbor and a lively 
central plaza. In the sixties, it was a hub of rum production, home to 
one of the island’s largest cathedrals and three movie theatres. Every 
year during carnival, people came to Arecibo from all over the island to 
dance to steel-drum bands. There was a fifty-room hotel on the plaza, 
where visiting scientists and engineers sometimes stayed, and where the 
New York/Times/and the/Daily News/were delivered every Sunday. Gordon 
and his team moved to Arecibo in 1960, setting up shop in a small office 
behind the cathedral. Several other mainland scientists and their 
families, along with a few Cuban engineers, settled in Radioville, a 
seaside development a couple of miles west of the center of town—named 
for a radio station, not for the observatory, which, in any case, was 
still just an idea.

Size was always a core-value proposition of the observatory at Arecibo. 
At the time, the largest radio telescope, near Manchester, England, had 
a diameter of two hundred and fifty feet; Arecibo’s telescope would be a 
thousand feet wide, dwarfing every other such instrument in use. The 
limestone hills of northern Puerto Rico were dotted with natural 
sinkholes, which made the excavation and construction simpler, though 
there was nothing simple about building a spherical dish with the area 
of approximately eighteen football fields. The curve of the dish had to 
be precise in order for the radio waves to be gathered within a movable 
instrument platform. According to the astronomer Don Campbell, who 
arrived at Arecibo in 1965 and is now working on a history of the 
facility, the construction of the observatory—which was built at a cost 
of around nine million dollars, the equivalent of more than seventy 
million today—was a tremendous achievement.

The original walkway to the suspended platform had wooden slats. There 
was no phone communication from the observatory to the city, though 
there was a radio link to a phone that rang on the fourth floor of the 
Space Sciences Building at Cornell. Back then, the trip from San Juan to 
the observatory might take two or three hours, longer during the harvest 
season, when trucks piled high with sugarcane clogged the narrow roads. 
Joanna Rankin, a radio astronomer at the University of Vermont, who made 
her first observation at Arecibo in 1969, told me that the terrain at 
the site was so steep and unforgiving she found it miraculous that the 
place had even been built. “Going up there at night was like being on an 
island in the sky,” she said. “So vast and so delicate.” The facility 
attracted an adventurous sort of personality in those early days, 
Campbell said. Still, it was good living: the scientists worked hard all 
week and went to the beach every Sunday. The Arecibo Country Club, which 
had no golf course and whose swimming pool was often drained of water, 
nonetheless hosted great parties, to which the scientists were often 
invited. And, of course, the chance to work on a telescope of that 
magnitude was unique.

Planetary and atmospheric researchers used Arecibo to transmit a radio 
signal toward a target—a planet, an asteroid, the ionosphere—and deduced 
information from the echoes that came back. Radio astronomers, on the 
other hand, mostly listened to naturally occurring radio waves that 
originated in space—what was once known as “cosmic noise.” Because radio 
astronomy doesn’t require darkness, Arecibo operated at all hours of the 
day and night, and several of the scientists I spoke to described a 
tight-knit community, with colleagues working across disciplines, 
delighting in one another’s discoveries. When word came that Joseph 
Taylor and Russell Hulse had won the Nobel Prize, in 1993, it was as if 
all the scientists at Arecibo had won it. Those who heard the news while 
having breakfast in the cafeteria danced joyfully around the table. 
Taylor later had a replica of the prize made for the observatory’s 
visitors’ center.

The instruments and equipment at Arecibo were in a constant state of 
reinvention. In 1974, the wire mesh that originally formed the spherical 
surface of the dish was swapped for roughly forty thousand 
perforated-aluminum panels, which made it possible to observe at higher 
frequencies. The most striking upgrade came in the nineties, with the 
twenty-five-million-dollar construction of a Gregorian dome, to house 
more sensitive instrumentation, which added an extra three hundred tons 
of weight to the platform. According to Campbell, Gordon, who had 
retired by then, visited the site and joked that the addition “destroyed 
the symmetry of my telescope.”

The problems began for Arecibo in the mid-aughts, when the National 
Science Foundation, which owned the site and supported it with about 
twelve million dollars a year, convened a panel of astronomers to 
evaluate the foundation’s holdings. With the N.S.F. facing flat budget 
allocations, and with several large investments in new telescopes under 
way, the panel recommended a multimillion-dollar cut to the Arecibo 
astronomy budget, to be implemented over several years. The report was 
stark and final: if partners couldn’t be found to help cover the cost of 
maintaining the site by 2011, Arecibo should be closed.

According to Daniel Altschuler, who was then the observatory’s director 
of operations, the report had a catastrophic impact on morale. But 
Congress provided a lifeline when it mandated that/nasa/track at least 
ninety per cent of near-Earth objects larger than four hundred and fifty 
feet—the kind, in other words, that could wipe out entire cities. As it 
happened, Arecibo’s powerful transmitter could beam radio waves at 
asteroids and measure their size, the quality of their surface, their 
speed, their orbit, and their rotation in astonishing detail. This added 
a few million dollars to the yearly budget—a stay of execution, more or 
less, which eased the pressure without providing a long-term solution. 
Scott Ransom, a staff astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy 
Observatory, in Charlottesville, Virginia, made observations from 
Arecibo for twenty years. He told me that there was always a sense that 
the facility was living on borrowed time. “The next hurricane, the next 
earthquake, the next downturn in the economy, the next political turn 
was going to be the end for Arecibo,” he said.

Bob Kerr, who became the director four years after Altschuler left, said 
that the observatory had somehow become “the poster child for so-called 
life-cycle planning”—the notion that limited funds require 
decision-makers to decommission older facilities as new ones are 
developed. Even now, Kerr finds this attitude mystifying. Not only were 
the scientists at Arecibo still producing cutting-edge research but the 
observatory played a significant role in fulfilling many of the N.S.F.’s 
stated goals, including democratizing access and inspiring young people, 
particularly Puerto Rican and other Latino students, to enter the 
sciences. “These are things that you would have thought N.S.F. would 
have held as a jewel in the crown,” Kerr said. “I’ve never been able to 
understand why N.S.F. walked away from that accomplishment.” In 2015, he 
resigned. “Many staff members feared they would have to be the ones to 
turn off the lights,” he told me.

In 2018, less than a year after Hurricane Maria, a partnership led by 
the University of Central Florida took over management of the 
observatory. Ray Lugo, the director of U.C.F.’s Florida Space Institute, 
who was appointed after a long career at/nasa/, told me that, when 
Cornell oversaw the observatory, contributions from the N.S.F. ran to 
tens of millions of dollars a year. U.C.F. has enjoyed no such largesse. 
By 2023, the last year of its contract, N.S.F. contributions are slated 
to be reduced to just two million dollars. “They’re looking for a 
graceful exit,” Lugo said. U.C.F. proposed that the N.S.F. pass the 
title and ownership of the site to the State of Florida, which would 
mean that a significant part of the fight for dollars to support the 
observatory would take place in Tallahassee, not Washington. But the 
move stalled, according to Lugo, because of opposition from José E. 
Serrano, a congressman representing New York, who has since retired. 
(Serrano, who was born in Puerto Rico, saw support of Arecibo as a 
federal commitment to the people there. “I didn’t want to let the N.S.F. 
wash their hands of it,” he said.)

<https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a24447>“No, I’m not interested in 
your new hygiene protocol.”

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Cartoon by P. C. Vey

Meanwhile, the damage from Hurricane Maria was assessed, and the 
consensus was that the telescope had been spared any serious 
impact—something of a miracle, considering the power of the storm. It’s 
less clear what the consequences of the thousands of earthquakes that 
shook the island in early 2020 may have been. In any case, maintenance 
and repair on the instrument, given its size and complexity, had always 
been somewhat ad hoc. “It’s not as if replacement parts can be taken off 
the shelf,” Luisa Fernanda Zambrano, a Ph.D. candidate who has worked at 
Arecibo for seven years, told me. “If something broke, repairs were 
always a little bit MacGyver.”

The first cable came loose on August 10th, tearing a hundred-foot gash 
in the dish and damaging about two hundred and fifty of its panels. It 
was concerning, but did not, at the time, seem to represent an 
existential threat to the observatory itself. The N.S.F. authorized the 
purchase of replacement parts. Then, on November 6th, while engineers 
were still studying how repairs could be made, a second cable broke. At 
that point, there was no way back. On November 19th, the N.S.F. declared 
that Arecibo’s telescope would be decommissioned, pending an analysis of 
the safest way to disassemble it. That question became moot less than 
two weeks later, when the remaining cables gave way. The observatory, 
the most iconic symbol of U.S. investment on the island for nearly six 
decades, was gone. All that was left, in Lugo’s words, was “a bunch of 
aluminum panels sitting at the bottom of a sinkhole.”

Afew days after the collapse, the N.S.F. released a video of the moment 
the telescope fell, shot from a drone flying just above the Gregorian 
dome. The soundless video shows the cables beginning to unravel, first 
one, then another, then several strands snapping at once, before the 
camera turns, gazing suddenly down at the ruined dish. Another video, 
taken from below, near the base of one of the towers from which the dome 
was suspended, shows the scene with sound, an ominous, heaving rumble 
before the cables give and the platform swings behind the trees and 
offscreen. The tops of the towers snap like matchsticks.

Online, videos of the collapse were sometimes posted with a trigger 
warning. Chris Salter, an astronomer who worked at Arecibo for 
twenty-six years, told me that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to 
watch them yet. “It’s like losing a family member,” he said. On social 
media, hundreds of Puerto Rican scientists and students posted tributes 
to the observatory, under the hashtags #WhatAreciboMeansToMe and 
#SaveTheAO. To scroll through them was to be struck again and again by 
the staggering scale of the loss. According to scientists at Arecibo, 
data collected there has fuelled thirty-five hundred scientific 
publications and nearly four hundred master’s or Ph.D. theses. More than 
twenty asteroids were studied from the observatory and named after 
Arecibo scientists and technicians. Abel Méndez, an astronomer at the 
University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, told me that the very presence of 
the observatory had helped him overcome the impostor syndrome that might 
otherwise have plagued him, as a working-class kid from a public school 
who dreamed of entering the sciences. He’d first seen the telescope as 
an eleven-year-old boy. There was no visitors’ center then, so he had 
called from a pay phone across the street from his school and asked if 
he could tour the observatory. “They took me beneath the dish,” he said. 
“To have a place like that here, in Puerto Rico, it gave me a sense of 
confidence.”

The collapse came at a particularly fraught moment for Arecibo. Every 
ten years, scientists from the various branches of astronomy produce a 
document, a kind of road map for the coming decade of research, setting 
priorities for new instruments and the most promising fields of 
investigation—all of which is a precursor to the allocation of N.S.F. 
funding. Before the collapse, the team at U.C.F. and collaborators had 
written more than twenty-five white papers arguing for the continued 
value of the observatory’s work. They were, until December, cautiously 
optimistic, but unfortunately the decadal committee’s review was nearly 
complete when the telescope fell. There was no indication that it would 
be modified at such a late date to take what had happened at Arecibo 
into account.

When the second cable broke, a group of astronomers from around the 
world began holding daily vigils on Zoom. After the collapse, the focus 
of those meetings widened to include plans for rebuilding. There was a 
sense of urgency, a desire to take advantage of the public outpouring of 
grief. Some of the scientists, led by Arecibo’s head of radio astronomy, 
D. Anish Roshi, met through December and January, and in early February 
released another white paper, with a proposed design for what they 
called the Next Generation Arecibo Telescope. The telescope, which would 
cost an estimated four hundred and fifty million dollars to build, would 
provide five times more sky coverage than the fallen instrument, with 
more than double the sensitivity in receiving radio signals and four 
times the transmitting power. Some two thousand scientists and 
enthusiasts in more than sixty countries endorsed the white paper. In a 
statement to me, an N.S.F. spokesperson wrote that the foundation had 
received the paper and was still “collecting such input.” In a report 
released in early March, the N.S.F. said that it was planning a 
community workshop this summer to encourage the submission of proposals 
for the future of the observatory.

Many Puerto Ricans, though, fear that Arecibo will be yet another 
illustration of the abandonment and neglect that have colored many 
aspects of life on the island. It’s been decades since Puerto Rico was 
the prosperous tropical outpost of American capitalism, used as a 
contrast and a cudgel against socialist Cuba. The brightest years of the 
island’s economy corresponded with the golden age of Arecibo, when the 
observatory was buzzing and the science was at its most revolutionary. 
The tax exemptions that fuelled Puerto Rico’s economy were phased out 
the year before the N.S.F. first threatened to shut down the 
observatory. The island has been in recession for the majority of the 
past fifteen years, while its debt has ballooned to more than 
seventy-two billion dollars—a figure so preposterous that, in 2015, 
Alejandro García Padilla, Puerto Rico’s governor at the time, announced 
that it was simply unpayable. Even before Hurricane Maria, the 
population had shrunk by more than ten per cent from its peak, in the 
mid-two-thousands; after the storm, an estimated hundred and thirty 
thousand people moved to the mainland. And the earth continues to shake: 
right now, the island is experiencing hundreds of tremors every month. 
“We’ve been through a lot,” Monzón told me. “There are people who don’t 
like the word ‘resilience,’ but that’s really what defines us.” 
Nonetheless, the fall of Arecibo was a painful setback.

When I spoke to Lugo in mid-February, he told me that workers were 
preparing to clear away the debris from the shattered Gregorian dome, 
cutting it free from the limestone into which it had embedded itself 
when it fell. Some aspects of the grim cleanup, which was projected to 
cost between thirty million and fifty million dollars, were already 
under way, and the hundred or so Puerto Rican staff members on site were 
struggling. On more than one occasion, Lugo told me, he’d turned a 
corner and come across an employee, alone, overcome with emotion. Lugo, 
who is of Puerto Rican descent, understood what they were going through, 
because he was going through it, too. Zambrano was assigned to a team 
tasked with salvaging parts from the debris, but for weeks she avoided 
looking directly at the damage. When she finally did so, in early 
February, she wept. Among the ruins, her team found two seven-foot 
klystrons—specialized vacuum tubes that amplify radio frequencies—that 
had somehow survived the crash nearly intact. They had been installed 
shortly before the first cable broke and had never been used. Now she 
wondered if they might be saved, not to be used as intended but to be 
part of a museum exhibit about what Arecibo had once been. ♦

Published in the print edition of theApril 5, 2021 
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05>, issue, with the 
headline “The Collapse at Arecibo.”

<https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/daniel-alarcon>
Daniel Alarcón <https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/daniel-alarcon>is 
a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the executive producer of 
“Radio Ambulante,” a Spanish-language podcast. He teaches at the 
Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.


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