Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A Preliminary Plan to Quickly Restore Utility to the Arecibo 305m Telescope

A Preliminary Plan to Quickly Restore Utility to the Arecibo 305m Telescope Since the fall of the Arecibo 305m telescope platform on 2020 December 1, there has been much discussion of building a new Arecibo telescope or rebuilding the facility that was destroyed. In the collapse, the top of the three platform support towers was sheared off, and the feed arm fell free from the swinging platform and destroyed 25% of the dish. Fortunately, the Control Building, the home of the computers, spectrometers, masers, atomic clocks, 430MHz Klystrons, etc., was spared. By replacing the main dish support cables and resurfacing with coarse mesh, the main dish can be repaired as a reflector for<HF operation. By replacing the damaged aluminum panels to make the dish whole again, RF operations at up to 500MHz can be resumed. In this paper, we outline the steps that can be taken to restore High Frequency (HF, 3–30MHz) ionospheric heating, 430MHz ionospheric incoherent scattering radar, passive radio observations of satellite arcing and pulsars, and to extend the field of regard to 47∘ from the zenith. This would restore and improve much of the utility of the Arecibo dish. Part of this plan involves supporting, positioning and pointing novel point feeds from lightweight football-camera-like cables, strung from the rebuilt tower tops. It is believed that the dish may thus become broadly useful long before replacement facilities can be engineered and constructed. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation World Scientific Publishing Company

A Preliminary Plan to Quickly Restore Utility to the Arecibo 305m Telescope

Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation , Volume 11 (03): 1 – Sep 24, 2022

Abstract

Since the fall of the Arecibo 305m telescope platform on 2020 December 1, there has been much discussion of building a new Arecibo telescope or rebuilding the facility that was destroyed. In the collapse, the top of the three platform support towers was sheared off, and the feed arm fell free from the swinging platform and destroyed 25% of the dish. Fortunately, the Control Building, the home of the computers, spectrometers, masers, atomic clocks, 430MHz Klystrons, etc., was spared. By replacing the main dish support cables and resurfacing with coarse mesh, the main dish can be repaired as a reflector for<HF operation. By replacing the damaged aluminum panels to make the dish whole again, RF operations at up to 500MHz can be resumed. In this paper, we outline the steps that can be taken to restore High Frequency (HF, 3–30MHz) ionospheric heating, 430MHz ionospheric incoherent scattering radar, passive radio observations of satellite arcing and pulsars, and to extend the field of regard to 47∘ from the zenith. This would restore and improve much of the utility of the Arecibo dish. Part of this plan involves supporting, positioning and pointing novel point feeds from lightweight football-camera-like cables, strung from the rebuilt tower tops. It is believed that the dish may thus become broadly useful long before replacement facilities can be engineered and constructed.

Loading next page...
 
/lp/world-scientific-publishing-company/a-preliminary-plan-to-quickly-restore-utility-to-the-arecibo-305m-UREzhBL6Rk

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
World Scientific Publishing Company
ISSN
2251-1717
eISSN
2251-1725
DOI
10.1142/S225117172250012X
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Since the fall of the Arecibo 305m telescope platform on 2020 December 1, there has been much discussion of building a new Arecibo telescope or rebuilding the facility that was destroyed. In the collapse, the top of the three platform support towers was sheared off, and the feed arm fell free from the swinging platform and destroyed 25% of the dish. Fortunately, the Control Building, the home of the computers, spectrometers, masers, atomic clocks, 430MHz Klystrons, etc., was spared. By replacing the main dish support cables and resurfacing with coarse mesh, the main dish can be repaired as a reflector for<HF operation. By replacing the damaged aluminum panels to make the dish whole again, RF operations at up to 500MHz can be resumed. In this paper, we outline the steps that can be taken to restore High Frequency (HF, 3–30MHz) ionospheric heating, 430MHz ionospheric incoherent scattering radar, passive radio observations of satellite arcing and pulsars, and to extend the field of regard to 47∘ from the zenith. This would restore and improve much of the utility of the Arecibo dish. Part of this plan involves supporting, positioning and pointing novel point feeds from lightweight football-camera-like cables, strung from the rebuilt tower tops. It is believed that the dish may thus become broadly useful long before replacement facilities can be engineered and constructed.

Journal

Journal of Astronomical InstrumentationWorld Scientific Publishing Company

Published: Sep 24, 2022

There are no references for this article.