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Meanwhile, installing a new telescope would cost up to $ 350 million, money the NSF doesn’t have, Vazquez said, adding it should come from the United States Congress.
“It’s a huge loss,” said Carmen Pantoja, an astronomer and professor at the University of Puerto Rico who used the telescope for her doctorate. “It was a chapter in my life.”
Scientists around the world had asked US officials and others to reverse the NSF’s decision to close the observatory. The NSF said at the time that it intended to eventually reopen the visitor center and restore operations at the observatory’s remaining assets, including its two LIDAR facilities used for superior atmospheric and ionospheric research, including cloud cover analysis. and precipitation data. The LIDAR facilities are still operational, along with a 12-meter telescope and a photometer used to study photons in the atmosphere, Mr. Vazquez said.
“We are saddened by this situation, but thankful that no one was hurt,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a statement. “When engineers informed NSF that the facility was unstable and posed a danger to Arecibo teams and staff, we took their warnings seriously.”
The telescope was built in the 1960s with money from the Department of Defense amid a push to develop ballistic missile defenses. It had endured hurricanes, tropical humidity and a recent series of earthquakes in its 57 years of operation.
The telescope was used to track asteroids on a path to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize, and determine if a planet is potentially habitable. It also served as a training camp for graduate students and attracted around 90,000 visitors a year.
“I’m one of those students who visited it as a young man and got inspired,” said Abel Mendez, professor of physics and astrobiology at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, who used the telescope for research. “The world without the observatory loses, but Puerto Rico loses even more”.
The last time he used the telescope was on August 6, just days before a plug holding the auxiliary cable snapped failed in what experts believe may be a manufacturing error. The National Science Foundation, which owns the observatory run by the University of Central Florida, said crews who evaluated the facility after the first crash determined that the remaining cables could carry the additional weight.
But on November 6 another cable broke.
Scientists used the telescope to study pulsars to detect gravitational waves and to search for neutral hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed. About 250 scientists around the world had used the observatory when it closed in August, including Mr. Mendez, who was studying the stars for habitable planets.
“I’m trying to recover,” he said. “I’m still very impressed.”
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