An official website of the United States government Learn about updates on NSF priorities and the agency's implementation of recent executive orders National Science Foundation since the 1970s Arecibo Observatory has contributed to scientific discoveries including the demonstration of gravitational waves from a binary pulsar and the first discovery of an extrasolar planet Arecibo Observatory's 305-meter telescope collapsed you can find information about the collapse and updates on the NSF Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education and Community Engagement (NSF Arecibo C3) opening at the site of the NSF Arecibo Observatory Historic District in Puerto Rico Information about the Arecibo Observatory's telescope collapse and NSF's efforts to address the damage and restore other parts of the observatory can be found in this section aligning with NSF's 75th anniversary commemorationsThe U.S National Science Foundation has announced that the official opening of the NSF Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education and Community Engagement (NSF Arecibo C3) will be moved to 2025 The opening will now coincide with NSF's 75th anniversary commemorations all year round marking a milestone that celebrates decades of advancing scientific discovery and innovation "NSF and the Puerto Rican community are eagerly anticipating the opening of Arecibo C3 I want to assure you NSF recognizes the importance of taking the necessary time to ensure the center meets the highest standards of excellence," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan we can ensure that the center has the time it needs while taking advantage of a unique opportunity to launch during NSF's 75th anniversary — a significant year that reflects our long-standing commitment to scientific progress and STEM education." Continue reading on NSF news NSF announces pilot phase and anticipated opening date of Arecibo C3 at the site of the NSF Arecibo Observatory Historic District in Puerto RicoAs excitement builds for the grand opening of the new U.S National Science Foundation Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education NSF is pleased to announce the start of a pilot phase this summer engaging small groups of local students and educators to test the center's activities and exhibits "We are thrilled to announce the pilot phase of NSF Arecibo C3 marking a significant step toward realizing NSF's vision of a dynamic science center open to all innovation and exploration," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan "As we prepare for the grand opening later this fall we look forward to engaging communities from across Puerto Rico and welcoming everyone to a center that will spark a passion for STEM and inspire future generations of scientists and researchers." Continue reading on NSF news National Science Foundation is excited by the progress underway as it prepares to open an educational center at the site of the NSF Arecibo Observatory Historic District in Puerto Rico The new Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education and Community Engagement (Arecibo C3) will continue the Arecibo Observatory's legacy of leadership within Puerto Rico and the STEM community through education Despite minor delays due to site preparation developing and implementing plans and preparing spaces for a suite of new STEM programs and initiatives to ensure a successful launch and a valuable experience for all participants the Arecibo C3 team will initiate a "pilot phase," engaging small groups of local students and educators to test the activities and exhibits at the center The insights garnered from this pilot phase will help in shaping the future of the center as the anticipated fall 2024 inaugural celebration draws near With respect to the scientific infrastructure at the site of the NSF Arecibo Observatory Historic District some areas are being reconfigured for Arecibo C3 use as laboratory space NSF has facilitated the transfer of three optical instruments to the island of Culebra: a spectrometer and two photometers along with accompanying equipment and trailers needed to operate these instruments These instruments will be used for atmospheric research under an active NSF grant Other scientific instruments and equipment are being stored safely while NSF determines the best potential usage The Arecibo C3 team has access to the instrumentation remaining at the site and may choose to incorporate it in some science engineering and mathematics education activities NSF will consider future support of instrumentation use in science operations through existing grants and future merit-reviewed proposals National Science Foundation has collaborated with NASA to study next-generation deep space radar needs releasing an interagency report by the Aerospace Corporation The report examines whether a coordinated development of future deep space radar facilities between NASA government agencies and stakeholders should be further explored to address agency needs for planetary defense geospace science and cislunar space situational awareness (SSA).   The report identified significant gaps between today's facilities and agency needs and explored the potential for planned facilities to meet those needs It developed a range of high-level strategies that meet some The report is not indicative of any government commitments regarding future deep space radar Planetary defense and cislunar SSA were selected as the two core mission areas that would drive further technical analyses based on stakeholder input at several technical interchange meetings The study is available at: nasa.gov Historic and technical data from the legacy Arecibo webpage are now available:  https://naic.nrao.edu/. https://naic.nrao.edu/arecibo/ (Note: This site is currently under migration and includes legacy Arecibo content).  National Science Foundation announced an investment of over $5 million over five-years for a collaborative partnership between three higher education institutions and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to establish a new multidisciplinary world-class educational center at the Arecibo Observatory site in Puerto Rico the Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education will serve as a catalyst for increased and inclusive engagement in a broad range of science cutting-edge research and workforce development initiatives by students local communities and the public within and outside of Puerto Rico "The new educational center builds on the great scientific educational and cultural legacy of the Arecibo Observatory and is closely aligned with NSF's goal to create STEM opportunities everywhere," said James L "The center aims to create new opportunities for STEM education scientists and researchers in various STEM disciplines ranging from astronomy and radio science to biological computer and natural sciences in Puerto Rico and beyond." Funded under the Arecibo Center for STEM Education and Research (ACSER) solicitation this new educational center is consistent with guidance provided in the "CHIPS and Science Act of 2022," which "encourages the National Science Foundation in consultation with other federal agencies to explore opportunities for strengthening and expanding the role of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico through education and future research capabilities and technology at the site." Four institutions will work together to establish Arecibo C3 and will collaborate with Ciencia Puerto Rico and STEM Program Evaluation, Assessment, and Research The center's outreach plan will include dynamic collaborations with members of the Puerto Rico STEM community private universities and STEM academic organizations to continue engaging faculty The new center is expected to open in early 2024 and will continue Arecibo Observatory's legacy of leadership within Puerto Rico and the STEM community through education Arecibo C3 will include a research laboratory and a hands-on interactive science center open to the public It will honor the observatory's rich contributions to astronomy and extend its focus to interdisciplinary fundamental and applied research that links astronomy data with touch The center's research will also integrate the life sciences and ultimately the breadth of all areas of STEM education are the ones who link all the sciences of the universe Honoring the legacy of the Arecibo Observatory NSF has entrusted Puerto Rico with a timely initiative centered on community all existing sciences and those yet to emerge," said Arecibo C3 Executive Director Wanda Díaz-Merced the scientific and harmonious vitality of the Puertorriqueños as maximum seekers of scientific truth will lead the path of science focusing on the people and the maximum expression of the human intellect that resides in the constantly evolving life of the entire community." Arecibo C3 will prioritize community engagement in its STEM education and outreach programs It will expand opportunities for student research and workforce development and support collaborative research between faculty K-12 teachers and students in Puerto Rico and the U.S Arecibo C3 will include a public science center that will focus on scientific themes research and innovations through exhibitions films and enrichment activities for children A highlight of the science center will be an Arecibo Observatory Legacy Exhibition These collaborative partnerships will form the cornerstones of Arecibo C3 and will further NSF's overall strategy to develop the diverse and globally engaged workforce necessary to ensure that the nation remains a global leader in science and engineering research and innovation For more information about NSF programs, visit nsf.gov. For updates on Arecibo C3, a new website is currently under development and will be accessible at www.areciboc3.org National Science Foundation issued a solicitation Oct world-class educational center at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico that aims to serve as a hub for STEM education and outreach The center would expand upon existing education and outreach opportunities currently in place at the Arecibo Observatory site while also implementing new STEM programs and initiatives The new center is expected to open in 2023 The scientific community has expressed broad support for an expanded educational facility the 2020 Decadal Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics over the course of its nearly 60-year history become a highly regarded part of the community for many of Puerto Rico's citizens serving as a source of pride and local economic benefit while also providing access to training and employment for many in the community Astro2020 called out support for its continuation as an important nexus for education and developing a diversified STEM workforce The center would have four primary functions aligned to its goals: The solicitation calls for proposals to manage the education Resources available on site include: a learning center the Ángel Ramos Science and Visitor's center A third-party contractor will be responsible for maintenance of the site resources listed above NSF program directors will work with awardees that have ongoing NSF-funded activities at the Arecibo Observatory to ensure continuity of programs The solicitation does not include rebuilding the 305-meter telescope or operational support for current scientific infrastructure such as the 12-meter radio telescope or Lidar facility Teams seeking to utilize existing scientific infrastructure or proposing for new projects can submit proposals that are complementary to the scope of the new center All proposals will go through the standard NSF merit review process Interested parties are advised to contact a NSF program director in their program area to discuss the proposal prior to submission This new educational center opportunity is consistent with guidance provided in the "CHIPS and Science Act" The act "encourages the National Science Foundation in consultation with other Federal agencies The solicitation is available por sus siglas en inglés) emitió una solicitud el 13 de octubre invitando propuestas para la creación de un nuevo centro educativo multidisciplinario de clase mundial en el Observatorio de Arecibo en Puerto Rico el cual tendría como objetivo servir como un centro para la educación y divulgación de las disciplinas STEM (ciencia El centro tendría como objetivo ampliar las oportunidades de educación ya existentes en el Observatorio de Arecibo y al mismo tiempo implementaría nuevos programas e iniciativas de STEM El nuevo centro abriría sus puertas en el 2023 La comunidad científica ha expresado un amplio apoyo a la creación de un centro educativo en dicha localidad La Encuesta Decenal de Astronomía y Astrofísica de 2020 a lo largo de sus casi 60 años de historia se ha convertido en una parte muy querida de la comunidad de Puerto Rico sirviendo como fuente de orgullo y beneficio económico local al mismo tiempo que brinda empleo y capacitación para muchos en la comunidad Astro2020 expresó apoyo para la creación de este centro como un nexo importante para la educación la comunidad y el desarrollo de una fuerza laboral de STEM diversificada El centro tendría cuatro funciones principales alineadas con sus objetivos: La solicitud invita propuestas para la gestión y manejo de los aspectos de educación investigación de STEM y divulgación del centro Los recursos ya disponibles en el sitio incluyen: un centro de aprendizaje el Centro de Ciencias y Visitantes Ángel Ramos Un contratista externo será responsable del mantenimiento de estos recursos además del mantenimiento de los terrenos NSF trabajará con los adjudicatarios que tienen actividades en curso financiadas por la NSF en el Observatorio de Arecibo para asegurar la continuidad de dichos programas Cabe aclarar que la solicitud de propuestas no incluye la reconstrucción del telescopio de 305 metros ni el apoyo operativo para la infraestructura científica actual como el radiotelescopio de 12 metros o la instalación Lidar Los equipos y/o investigadores que deseen utilizar la infraestructura científica existente o proponer nuevos proyectos pueden presentar propuestas que sean complementarias a las funciones del nuevo centro educativo Todas las propuestas serán evaluadas por el proceso de revisión de méritos de la NSF Se les recomienda a las partes interesadas que se comuniquen con un director de programa de la NSF en su área de interés para analizar la propuesta antes de enviarla Esta nueva oportunidad del centro educativo coincide con las instrucciones proporcionada por la "Ley CHIPS y Ciencia" La ley "alienta a la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias a explorar oportunidades para fortalecer y expandir la función del Observatorio de Arecibo en Puerto Rico a través de programas de educación y futuras capacidades de investigación y tecnología en el sitio" La solicitud está disponible en The Arecibo Observatory Salvage Survey Committee (AOSSC) chartered by the University of Central Florida (UCF) and the U.S National Science Foundation (NSF) has posted their report following the conclusion of the salvage activities Visitor's Center ReopeningThe Ángel Ramos Foundation Science and Visitors Center at the Arecibo Observatory will reopen to the public on March 10 Visitors are welcomed Wednesdays through Sundays from 9:00 a.m A new outdoor exhibit was added with artifacts recovered from the telescope and its platform visitors will be able to access the observation deck and see where the telescope once stood The rest of the AO facility remains closed to the public A short public ceremony will be held at 10 a.m inside the Science and Visitors Center Auditorium some of the science investigations carried out at AO and the many educational opportunities available will be shared but they must reserve a date and time to visit through the online store Spaces are limited so an appointment is essential to secure your space Guests will not be allowed to enter without an appointment Visitors must also comply with the following guidelines: The temperature of each person will be taken at the entrance Anyone with a temperature of 100.4 F (38 C) or higher will not be able to enter Anyone without a mask will not be allowed inside and no masks will be provided The University of Central Florida manages the NSF facility under a cooperative agreement with Universidad Ana G Scientists and engineers on site continue to work on existing instrumentation the optical facility and the lidar facility and they are continuing to analyze and publish the large amount of data that already existed at the time of the 305m telescope collapse In addition to the studies conducted on the single socket where the first failure occurred there are two independent broader studies being carried out now We expect to learn of their findings later this year Arecibo ImageryThe latest images are available for download and a team of contractors have nearly completed the emergency cleanup activities at the Observatory entitled "Update on Arecibo Observatory Emergency Cleanup" contained an error with regard to the estimated number of damaged panels that had been removed from the reflector The estimate has been corrected in this updated report: La Fundación Nacional de las Ciencias de los EE y un equipo de contratistas ya han completado casi todas las actividades de limpieza de emergencia en el Observatorio Por favor vea el siguiente informe para una actualización de las medidas de protección ambiental y la conservación histórica: Corrección: El informe de noviembre de 2021 titulado "Actualización del Observatorio de Arecibo Limpieza de Emergencia" contenía un error en referencia al número estimado de paneles dañados que fueron removidos del reflector Dicho estimado ha sido corregido en este informe actualizado: and a team of contractors continue to perform emergency cleanup activities at the Observatory Please see the following report for an update on environmental protection measures and historic preservation: y un equipo de contratistas continúan llevando a cabo actividades de limpieza en el Observatorio Por favor vea los siguientes informes para una actualización de las medidas de protección ambiental y la conservación histórica: one of the trucks used to collect debris from the 305-meter telescope at the Arecibo Observatory made contact with power lines and internet cables while en route to the Observatory The incident interrupted power and internet service for hours While the trucks being used to transport the debris related to the December collapse of the 305-meter telescope at the Arecibo Observatory are well within the legal limits for height there are several areas along the transportation route that present challenges for clearing power lines and internet cables These areas are located along the secondary roads between the town of Arecibo and the Arecibo Observatory The Arecibo Observatory team is actively evaluating this situation and will take the immediate step of placing spotters en route to attempt to avoid future contact with power lines and internet cables during the remainder of the debris removal effort uno de los camiones que transportaba los escombros del Observatorio de Arecibo hizo contacto con las líneas eléctricas y cables de Internet mientras se dirigía al Observatorio El incidente interrumpió los servicios de electricidad y Internet durante varias horas Los camiones que se utilizan para transportar los escombros están dentro de los límites legales de altura hay varias áreas a lo largo de la ruta de transporte que presentan desafíos para despejar las líneas eléctricas y los cables de Internet Estas áreas están ubicadas a lo largo de las rutas secundarias entre el centro del pueblo de Arecibo y el Observatorio El equipo del Observatorio de Arecibo está evaluando activamente esta situación y colocará personal en las rutas para intentar evitar el contacto futuro con líneas elóectricas y cables de Internet durante el resto del proceso de remoción de escombros The Transportation Plan has been updated to reflect a minor change to the route on the highway side; there is no change to the route through the residential areas El plan de transporte ha sido actualizado para reflejar un cambio en la ruta correspondiente a la autopista; no se hizo ningún cambio a la ruta en las zonas residenciales Registration is now available for online attendance of a public meeting on anticipated truck traffic related to debris removal from the Arecibo Observatory hosted by The National Science Foundation (NSF) University of Central Florida (UCF) and the Arecibo Observatory (AO) will be held April 5 at 6:00 p.m. Use this link to register in advance for the webinar. If you have any issues, please contact Arecibo-feedback@nsf.gov you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar crews began transporting a small number of loads carrying debris from the Arecibo Observatory to a recycling facility The number of loads carrying debris will increase during the first week of April and continue through June 2021 All debris is from the December 2020 collapse of its 305-meter telescope The removal will advance the ongoing cleanup activities as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of Central Florida (UCF) work to restore remaining capabilities to operations The materials will be moved via hauling trucks all of which have integrated tarps to cover each load Transportation of materials and work vehicles can be expected Mondays-Saturdays between 7 a.m  We anticipate hauling debris and returning to Arecibo each day It is estimated work for this part of the project will continue through June or shortly thereafter Materials removed from the site will include soil as well as scrap metal and concrete mostly from the telescope’s instrument platform and its supporting structure Hauling of materials is not expected to create any significant increase in local traffic Transportation is expected to involve 3-4 trucks making approximately two round-trips per day Will this involve road closures or detours The transportation plan involves only a small number of trucks per day operating in normal traffic This work is not expected to have any negative impact NSF and UCF are coordinating with local officials to address any potential issues This work is not expected to generate significant noise beyond the sound of 3-4 trucks making approximately two round-trips per day as the loading of debris will take place on the Arecibo Observatory site Call or text 787-246-4200 for assistance and the debris will be retrieved The material will be hauled to recycling facilities and landfills in Puerto Rico Is any of this material being transported hazardous The materials have been tested and identified as non-hazardous waste Soil that was affected by a release of hydraulic fluid during the collapse of the dish has already been excavated and will be removed from the Observatory through a separate process Workers will continue to test all materials identified for disposal For the safety of our drivers and community members living alongside the steep road to Arecibo it is necessary to do the work in the daytime steep and narrow road poses an additional hazard at night The Observatory is only open to approved operations and scientific staff environmental and historical assessment duties This debris transportation process is part of the effort to fully reopen the Observatory los equipos comenzaron a transportar una pequeña cantidad de cargas con escombros desde el Observatorio de Arecibo a una facilidad de reciclaje La cantidad de cargas que transportan escombros aumentará durante la primera semana de abril y continuará hasta junio de 2021 Todos los escombros son del colapso de diciembre de 2020 de su telescopio de 305 metros La remoción avanzará las actividades de limpieza en curso ya que la Fundación Nacional de las Ciencias (NSF) y la Universidad de la Florida Central (UCF) trabajan para restaurar las capacidades restantes y poder operarlas La remoción inicial de materiales del Observatorio creará áreas de preparación para trabajos de limpieza adicionales en el sitio La remoción posterior de materiales será para limpieza a largo plazo; la disposición incluirá el reciclaje de la mayor cantidad posible de material Se conservará el material potencialmente útil para futuras operaciones científicas y se mantendrán en el lugar muestras importantes para la investigación forense en curso para comprender mejor la causa del colapso que incluye a representantes del Observatorio de Arecibo la Institución Smithsonian y universidades en Puerto Rico está revisando los escombros para identificar objetos de potencial científico para su posible reutilización y artículos de valor cultural o histórico que se conservarán para su posible exhibición en el sitio u otros museos Vea la información sobre la preservación histórica en el Observatorio para más información Los materiales se moverán a través de camiones de transporte todos los cuales tienen lonas integradas para cubrir cada carga Se puede esperar el transporte de materiales y vehículos de trabajo de lunes a sábado entre las 7 a.m Anticipamos transportar escombros y regresar a Arecibo todos los días Se estima que el trabajo para esta parte del proyecto continuará hasta junio o poco después Los materiales removidos del sitio incluirán suelo principalmente de la plataforma de instrumentos del telescopio y su estructura de soporte No se espera que el transporte de materiales genere un aumento significativo en el tráfico local Se espera que el transporte involucre de 3 a 4 camiones haciendo aproximadamente dos viajes de ida y vuelta por día saliendo del Observatorio de manera intermitente no como grupos grandes (máximo cuatro camiones) ¿Esto implicará cierres de carreteras o desvíos El plan de transporte involucra solo una pequeña cantidad de camiones por día operando en el tráfico normal No se espera que este trabajo tenga ningún impacto negativo NSF y UCF se están coordinando con los funcionarios locales para atender los problemas potenciales No se espera que este trabajo genere un ruido significativo más allá del sonido de 3-4 camiones que realizaran aproximadamente dos viajes de ida y vuelta por día ya que la carga de escombros se llevará a cabo en el sitio del Observatorio de Arecibo ¿Qué hago si veo escombros en la carretera Llame o envíe un mensaje de texto al 787-246-4200 para obtener ayuda y se recuperarán los escombros No intente quitar los escombros usted mismo ya que pueden ser pesados o tener bordes afilados El material será transportado a facilidades de reciclaje y vertederos en Puerto Rico ¿Alguno de este material transportado es peligroso Los materiales han sido probados e identificados como desperdicios no peligrosos El suelo que fue afectado por una liberación de fluido hidráulico durante el colapso del plato ha sido excavado y será retirado del Observatorio en cargas separadas Los trabajadores continuarán muestreando todos los materiales identificados para su disposición ¿Por qué no se puede hacer este trabajo de noche Para la seguridad de nuestros conductores y miembros de la comunidad que viven junto a la empinada carretera hacia Arecibo es necesario hacer el trabajo durante el día empinada y estrecha representa un peligro adicional durante la noche El Observatorio solo está abierto al personal de operaciones y científico autorizado así como a los trabajadores que realizan tareas de limpieza Este proceso de transporte de escombros es parte del esfuerzo para reabrir el Observatorio University of Central Florida (UCF) and the Arecibo Observatory (AO) will be hosting a public meeting to inform the local community of anticipated truck traffic related to debris removal from the Arecibo Observatory Interested members of the public are invited to attend the meeting The public meeting will be held April 5 at 6:00 p.m. Location: Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico The meeting will be held in both Spanish and English COVID-19 protocols will be followed during the in-person meeting Attendees must wear a mask or face covering practice six-foot social distancing at all times and use hand sanitizer as preventive measures La Fundación Nacional de las Ciencias (NSF por sus siglas en inglés) y el Observatorio de Arecibo (AO por sus siglas en inglés) estarán llevando a cabo una reunión pública para informar a la comunidad local sobre el tráfico de camiones anticipado debido a la remoción de escombros del Observatorio de Arecibo Se invita a los miembros del público interesados a asistir a la reunión La reunión pública se llevará a cabo el lunes Lugar: o Colegio de Ingenieros y Agrimensores de Puerto Rico La reunión se llevará a cabo en inglés y en español Se seguirán los protocolos de COVID-19 durante la reunión en persona Los asistentes deben llevar mascarilla o cubierta de cara practicar 6 pies de distanciamiento social en todo momento y utilizar desinfectante de manos como medidas preventivas Environmental Cleanup and Historic Preservation Sign up for email updates Damage to the Arecibo dish caused by the collapse of the telescope’s receiver A National Academies report exploring the cause of the 2020 collapse of the National Science Foundation’s Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico says major warning signs were missed by engineers prior to the telescope’s collapse 25 by a committee appointed to investigate the collapse explains that the cables holding up the central platform of the telescope most likely failed because of a process called zinc creep deformation of the zinc used to anchor the steel cables holding up the telescope’s 900-ton receiver caused the cables to slip out of their sockets should have raised alarm among structural engineers but was not identified as a major issue in maintenance checks The report notes that zinc creep is not a problem that has been documented at other facilities which could be why engineers overlooked the issue at Arecibo The committee says the uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment at the telescope likely accelerated the deformation of the zinc but was unable to prove this definitively the movement of the cables from their sockets should have prompted further investigation and concern The committee recommends that NSF prioritize maintenance funding for aging facilities and increase the number of maintenance checks they perform as facilities age as management of the Arecibo facility changed hands “For aged structures such as the Arecibo Telescope additional facility maintenance and monitoring (and their associated costs) may be warranted,” the report says “The committee does not know how much of this monitoring and inspection reduction was caused directly or indirectly by NSF’s reduction in Arecibo funding over its final decade of service The committee concluded that the safety consequences of a structural failure of the Arecibo Telescope were not considered in decision-making during its design and operation or in decisions about extending its life.” may have exacerbated the decline of the facility’s structural integrity While the telescope had survived many natural disasters before with cables subjected to the “highest structural stress they had ever endured since it opened in 1963,” the report says Records indicate the telescope faced wind speeds well over 100mph but the report authors were unable to determine what maximum wind speed the telescope was designed to withstand The report says photographs of cable sockets from 2019 provide a “clear indication of major socket deterioration” post-Maria This should have raised “serious concern,” the report says but it finds there was “no mention of such anomalies anywhere in the inspection reports.” It concludes that the telescope operators “would have benefited from more detailed engineering or structural risk guidance concerning inspection protocol and/or other indicators of structural deterioration and unexpected performance.” NSF was considering proposals for the management and operations of the telescope The University of Central Florida was awarded the contract A transition period from SRI International to UCF took place from February through June of that year former director of UCF’s Florida Space Institute and principal investigator for the Arecibo Observatory operations grant told the report committee he inspected the facility post-Maria as part of the handover to UCF Lugo noticed cables had begun to pull out of their sockets but was told they had been reviewed by an external engineer and there was “not any real concern about cable failure.” NSF told the committee it does not have a record of this exchange and that “at no time during the review of damage post-Maria was increasing socket slippage ever brought to NSF’s attention as one of the issues to be considered for further inspection Lugo applied to NSF for funding for structural repairs but these remained incomplete by the time the telescope collapsed The report notes that none of the proposed repairs would have saved the Arecibo Observatory from collapse “Only after the first socket failure did the consultants focus technical attention on the cable sockets failed to consider the degradation mechanisms of the sockets there remained only a few months to respond,” the report states It recommends that NSF offer the remaining socket and cable sections “to the research community for continued fundamental research on large-diameter wire connections the long-term creep behavior of zinc spelter connections an NSF spokesperson thanked the committee for their “thorough review of the circumstances” resulting in the collapse “We welcome the opportunity to consider their findings and how we can incorporate their recommendations in the future.” The famed Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed on Dec when the 900-ton equipment platform suspended above the 1,000-foot diameter telescope dish crashed through the dish Engineering and Medicine formed a committee to review the collapse and three earlier investigative reports and to issue a final verdict on the contributing factors and probable causes of the failure Habib Tabatabai, professor of civil engineering and an expert on structural cables and cable-supported bridges, served as a member of the committee, which published its final report on Oct This committee attempted to answer a question not addressed in the other inquiries: Why did multiple cable failures occur at Arecibo when no records exist of this specific type of failure (cables pulling out from their sockets) occurring anywhere else in the long history of these structural cables The telescope’s platform was suspended with steel cables from three towers located around the dish All cables terminated in “spelter” sockets at their ends The spelter sockets were filled with molten zinc during manufacturing to surround the individual wires and secure the cables at their ends The visual inspections of cables in 2018 and 2019 had indicated that some of the cables had pulled out of their end sockets to varying degrees following the 2017 Hurricane Maria The earlier investigative reports and the National Academies’ also reported that “creep” of zinc in the cable sockets was a major contributor to the cable pullout and subsequent collapse “Creep” is the long-term deformation of materials under sustained stress But what exactly caused the excessive creep of zinc “Zinc-filled spelter sockets have been used for decades in a variety of industries,” Tabatabai said “This type of failure of zinc-filled spelter sockets has not been reported anywhere else despite its widespread use.” Previous investigations also noted that the patterns of cable pull-outs were not uniform A pivotal moment in the telescope’s history new (auxiliary) cables were added to the structure to accommodate the installation of new components The committee carefully examined the observed failure patterns and concluded that the most plausible explanation is that “low-current long-term electroplasticity” contributed to the excessive creep of zinc within the sockets An important feature of the Arecibo Telescope was that it emitted powerful electromagnetic waves which generate electrical currents in metals Electroplasticity can result in a softening effect when very high electrical currents flow through a metal Tabatabai said it is conceivable that exposing the zinc to low-level electrical currents over a long period of time (decades) could also result in a softening effect this has not been experimentally evaluated in the past Because of his experience working on the Arecibo report Tabatabai plans to test the concept of low-current electroplasticity of pure zinc in the UWM Structural Engineering Laboratory electroplasticity has been associated with very high currents over a short period of time,” he added “We are going to examine the effects of low currents over a much longer period of time.” View all View all Copyright © University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. Earth’s First Interstellar Transmission In 1974 we beamed a radio transmission into space that changed the way we think about our place in the cosmos By Nadia Drake edited by Lee Billings The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico transmitted the most powerful known interstellar message in 1974 The facility’s iconic 1,000-foot-wide dish that beamed out the signal collapsed in 2020 A half-century ago humanity sent its first postcard to the stars 1974—a turbulent time on planet Earth and the world economy was still sputtering from a Middle East oil embargo that was imposed the previous year had retreated from its crewed forays to the moon but was still fighting in Vietnam and the resignation of scandal-plagued President Richard Nixon was still reverberating The Beatles had effectively disbanded earlier yet would officially do so before year’s end (John Lennon’s solo single—“Whatever Gets You thru the Night”—topped the U.S this first-ever interstellar transmission was both a literal and figurative ray of light Astronomers had already started eavesdropping on the heavens hopefully awaiting murmurs from beyond that would break our seeming cosmic solitude But this was something different—an intentional summons perhaps an invitation for communion with hypothetical beings among the stars Sent using a powerful radio transmitter at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico it signaled the start of an age that is still unfolding in which our rapidly changing technological civilization confronts an uncertain fate beneath a silent sky and grapples with how to present itself If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today Composed in binary code—a string of 1’s and 0’s—what’s now known as the “Arecibo message” has become an icon of the 20th-century space age in the 50 years since it left Earth You’ve almost certainly seen it at some point even if you didn’t recognize it for what it was Arrange its digits in a grid with the right dimensions and the transmission yields a two-dimensional image that tells of us humans our home in the solar system and the instrument that relayed the message skyward “I think of the Arecibo message in this grand tradition of attempts at communicating with ET or transmitting things into space that are fundamentally messages, at least in part, to Earth as well,” says Rebecca Charbonneau a science historian at the American Institute of Physics “Human beings are very visual creatures and we need something visual and beautiful to help channel feelings of spirituality and wonder,” she says the Arecibo message is an icon in that old tradition—a visual representation of something that makes us feel small in an expansive and sublime kind of way.” The Arecibo Message as it appears when its 1,679 bits are properly aligned on a grid (left) an annotated illustration explaining its components (center) and a photograph of the message's recently discovered hand-drawn first draft (right) SPL/Science Source (left and middle); Frank Drake (right) “Those images are seared in the mind of anybody who thinks about this stuff or is aware of the history,” says David Grinspoon senior scientist for astrobiology strategy at NASA and the motivation is transcendent in that it was not for national gain or personal gain the Arecibo message was not the first deliberate That honor belongs to what is now known as the Morse message which in 1962 used Morse code to transmit three words in Russian Designed by three Soviet scientists and sent using a planetary radar complex at Yevpatoria in Crimea the Morse message was never meant to be received by aliens—unless any of them (improbably) happened to be living on its inhospitable target Rather the transmission bounced off Venus and came right back to Earth where its nationalist sentiments—the words mir (which can mean “peace” or “world”) “Lenin” and “USSR”—were received by its intended audience: us “I’ve seen people claim this was the first case of messaging extraterrestrials,” Charbonneau says “I don’t think you can do that because it’s very clear from the content of the message that it did not have an extraterrestrial audience in mind.” the Soviet scientists sent the message to commemorate the integration of a new radar array at their facility “Their gut instinct was to send a message into space,” she says “And that’s what happened with the Arecibo message as well—to commemorate the Arecibo upgrades.” those upgrades transformed the Arecibo Observatory into a world-class facility for radio astronomy They included a powerful radio transmitter as well as a gleaming aluminum surface for the telescope’s 1,000-foot-wide reflector dish Dad—who was at the time director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center which ran Arecibo—invited more than 200 people to a ceremony at the observatory The transmission would conclude the celebration demonstrating the nation’s newfound interstellar reach to the gathered VIPs and the world (Oliver notified Dad with a binary reply of his own: a coded image of a martini glass then a graduate student at Cornell University Isaacman offered some suggestions that he recalls Dad adopting such as making modifications to the binary numbers on the message’s top row and offsetting the planet Earth to indicate that it’s our home “I didn’t ascribe a lot of importance to it at the time I just thought it was really cool,” says Isaacman who today is retired from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and divides his time between Maryland and Hawaii “But it was a tech demo that crosses a line into a regime with very profound philosophical implications.” Dad targeted a globular cluster of stars called Messier 13 (M13) or the Great Cluster in the constellation of Hercules because it would conveniently be overhead at the time of the ceremony (nestled in a sinkhole Arecibo’s giant dish was not fully steerable) Dad’s message will reach M13—or at least part of it because the majority of the cluster’s thousands of stars will have moved out of the telescope’s beam by then But anyone who’s around to detect the Arecibo transmission will have a blueprint telling them a lot about us: what we look like which chemical elements and biomolecules make up our DNA what our planetary system is and how many of us existed in 1974 Dad’s transmission concluded with a binary encoded representation of the Arecibo dish itself “In some ways, it was kind of a love letter to the telescope,” says Kathryn Denning an anthropologist at York University in Ontario who studies the scientific search for life beyond Earth this performance has meant so many different things to different people.” he told the audience what was about to happen—that they were about to end the proceedings with “a very important beginning.” It is presently 10 million times brighter than the sun,” he said “Anyone who looks in this direction is going to see our star brighter than any other star has ever been except those others who may have sent intelligent signals.” And then Representative John Davis of Georgia gave the go-ahead to personnel in the Arecibo control room by paraphrasing a quote from Daniel Webster that hangs in the House of Representatives “Let us develop the resources of our land and see whether we might not perform something worthy to be remembered,” he said “And I think this day we have.” Bernie Jackson a heliophysicist now at the University of California had programmed the message into the computer and pushed the button that began the transmission speakers blasted audio as the message left Earth—a simple translation of those 0’s and 1’s into two audible tones The speakers warbled for nearly three minutes its first bits were nearly at the orbit of Mars “What they were hearing was what we might hear from another world,” Dad told me when we discussed the message on its 40th anniversary “It had the aura of human beings doing something marvelous that involved the whole cosmos.” from a more innocent time that was less plagued by cosmic paranoia Few people opposed it for the seemingly remote possibility of summoning malevolent alien invaders to Earth not everyone was particularly pleased with the experiment a lively debate has sprung up regarding the ethics of interstellar messaging Some opponents consider it a dangerous practice that might attract the attention of civilizations bent on destruction; others are more concerned with who gets to decide what we send “Now that we know about exoplanets and potentially habitable planets within several light-years it’s not as outlandish to think that there could be a consequence of sending something and that we could in our lifetimes—or in the lifetimes of our close descendants—receive something back,” Grinspoon says “But I’m still of this optimistic mindset that if we did get the response to something it would be the most wonderful thing ever—not just cool but potentially transformative in a really needed the visionary astronomer who designed the Arecibo message and helped begin the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence Ramin Rahimian for The Washington Post via Getty Images “If everybody in the galaxy keeps quiet, we never figure out if we are alone,” says Jonathan Jiang of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who, along with his colleagues, has designed an upgraded version of Dad’s interstellar memo “Communication is the key to figuring out whether there’s anybody out there.” if we receive an answer to the Arecibo message telling us that we are not alone it won’t happen in our lifetime—or even in the next millennium it will take that message some 25,000 years to reach the outskirts of M13 and at least another 25,000 years for any potential reply to reach Earth “Will there really be anybody here to reply to?” Denning asks “I don’t know if that’s a question they would have asked That Dad and others were even considering a project that might unfold on such an extended timescale reflects a maturity in thinking that was perhaps a bit unusual for the 1970s “That forces you to imagine our own longevity in a way that almost nothing else makes us think of,” he says “What else do we do that we have to think of the consequences 50,000 years in the future?” It requires that you imagine there is something to be found—and that we humans are capable of making that discovery and reacting accordingly as long as we are listening for whispered signals from distant civilizations announcing our own presence is a moral obligation (And Jiang also told me that making cosmic messages can be an exercise in helping humankind’s moral advancement pushing us to grow out of the conflicts that now so consume and threaten our world.) they are Earth revealing itself for mere instants as some beaming declaration that briefly outshines the sun and most everything else on some snippet of the electromagnetic spectrum just another silent world among billions in the Milky Way With my father having fallen silent, too, I sometimes find solace knowing there’s some small part of him still out there, forever traveling. Frank Drake never left Earth, yet his message—our message—is now 50 light-years away. More than 1,000 star systems reside in that volume of space a vastness so easily lost in our galaxy’s billions-strong stellar swirl we know of only a few that are in the transmitter’s beam although so far no one has echoed in reply But that didn’t stop Dad from searching Too many secrets remain hidden among the stars Nadia Drake is a freelance science journalist who specializes in covering space science and space exploration She is a former contributing writer with National Geographic and was the interim physics editor at Quanta magazine for which she covered NASA’s Artemis I mission Subscribe to Scientific American to learn and share the most exciting discoveries innovations and ideas shaping our world today Scientific American is part of Springer Nature which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us) Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers A half-century ago humanity sent its first postcard to the stars Nadia Drake is a freelance science journalist who specializes in covering space science and space exploration Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy and is a senior editor at Scientific American He is the author of a critically acclaimed book Five Billion Years of Solitude: the Search for Life Among the Stars which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics In addition to his work for Scientific American Billings's writing has appeared in the New York Times and many other publications.Billings joined Scientific American in 2014 and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine in journalism from the University of Minnesota Introducing the all-new Astronomy.com Forum! Become a part of our Community!  >> Visit Now The publication is the most comprehensive analysis yet of the downfall of the fabled observatory which occurred over several months in late 2020 when multiple cables holding the telescope’s main platform above its 1,000-foot-wide (305 meters) dish failed The loss of Arecibo was a devastating blow to astronomers “one of the most … baffling failures of the modern era,” the report says And while the damage from the winds of Hurricane Maria in 2017 triggered the sequence of events that led to the collapse the sockets may also have been weakened by current induced by Arecibo’s powerful radio transmitter The report also finds that the cables that eventually failed were seen slipping out of their sockets in 2018 and 2019 but that contracted consultants did not think they were a threat The slippages were also not taken into account in post-Maria assessments of the structural integrity of the facility An anomaly of the type observed at the Arecibo sockets ”should raise all kinds of alarm,” says committee member Habib Tabatabai an expert in structural cables at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Tabatabai tells Astronomy: “I give this analogy: A patient goes to a doctor and he has his eyes bulged out by 1 inch The doctor looks at it and he has not seen anything like this before and he consults his medical books and there’s no mention of this in their books So this anomaly should not mean that it is OK.” immediately causing the 900-ton receiving platform to crash into the dish below on Dec The cables were held in place by spelter sockets a common type of cable socket that can be welded shut by filling it with molten zinc and letting it harden these sockets began to fail after category-4 Hurricane Maria battered the observatory in 2017 with winds of up to 118 mph (190 km/h) “Gradually the zinc lost its hold on the cables and allowed several of them to pull out,” the report says the committee believes the telescope would still be standing today but might have eventually collapsed if its unique accelerated zinc creep had not been addressed before it was decommissioned,” the report says Arecibo staff recorded that key cables had begun to slip out of their sockets by as much as 1.5 inches But neither staff nor contracted structural engineers appeared to recognize the threat this posed to the entire structure The slippage “should have raised the highest alarm level requiring urgent action,” the report states “The lack of documented concern from the contracted engineers about the inconsequentiality of cable pullouts or the safety factors between Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the failure is alarming.” Had the cable slippage been identified as an issue well before the first cable failed it would have been safe to access the top of the towers to install devices to relieve the load on the sockets The NSF told the NASEM committee that the socket slippage was never brought to the agency’s attention as an issue to be considered for further inspection who headed the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida in Orlando — the observatory’s operator at the time of the collapse — told the committee “I have used wire ropes and socketed cables lifting devices “I was told that it had been reviewed by an external engineer and that there was not any real concern about cable failure.” The report does not identify the external engineer planned repairs for the telescope ran into bureaucratic hold-ups But because inspectors had failed to identify the cable slippage as the most pressing issue “none of the proposed repairs would have saved the Arecibo Telescope from collapse,” the report concludes the repairs focused on one of the telescope’s remaining main cables The engineering firm WSP was to oversee the repairs and perform structural analysis NSF representatives told the committee in 2022 that “NSF was informed that the WSP structural engineers visited the site in February 2020 to work on the spliced main cable replacement and they performed inspection of the towers and platform primary structural elements while there but no additional damage was noted during those inspections.” NSF further said that it does not have any evidence that WSP looked specifically at socket pullouts The report states that the committee “was not afforded an opportunity to question WSP.” Tabatabai says the committee was unable to coordinate a discussion because WSP was no longer under contract to the Arecibo Observatory WSP had not responded to a request for comment The collapse is the first documented case of zinc creep resulting in cables pulling out of such sockets in over a century of use The committee says they do not know and cannot prove what caused Arecibo’s extraordinary rate of zinc creep But the committee did rule out some obvious candidates like steel fatigue or corrosion caused by the humid climate and salty sea air finding no evidence that they contributed to the collapse Preventative measures that Arecibo took to maintain the sockets were effective in those regards The only plausible hypothesis the committee could think of is that the electromagnetic radiation from Arecibo’s radio transmitter — for decades the most powerful on Earth — may have accelerated the failure This is used in certain manufacturing processes where high levels of current are applied to zinc the levels of current induced at the sockets would have been orders of magnitude lower the zinc that secured the cables may have deformed In other words, every radio signal Arecibo ever sent — every radar beam it bounced off of Mercury or Venus or near-Earth asteroids, and even the famous interstellar radio message it sent to the globular cluster M13 in an attempt to communicate with intelligent alien life — may have cumulatively contributed to the telescope’s eventual demise Tabatabai says the unique nature of the failure means it’s important for engineers to learn from the collapse Tabatabai leads the Structural Engineering Lab at UW-Milwaukee and plans to begin small-scale experiments to verify the process If experiments can show that low levels of current can accelerate zinc creep it would not only improve understanding of the limitations of the material but “it opens up opportunities for exploiting it for beneficial uses as well RELATED: The rise and fall of Arecibo Observatory – an oral history updates and special offers via email from Astronomy.com Astronomy leads the astronomy hobby as the most popular magazine of its kind in the world Count me in Subscribers can access their digital magazine issues and registered users can participate in our Community forums and galleries astronomers used the radio telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory to send a hello to the universe On November 16, 1974, a group of scientists sent a message to the stars, with the hope that someone out there might be listening. They used the 1,000-foot Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, constructed a decade earlier. Today, the Arecibo Message is still on its way to the star cluster Messier 13, and will take tens of thousands of years to get there In a 1975 issue of Scientific American, astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan explain that the Arecibo Message was symbolic—proof that a radio message could be sent across the galaxy. It was the beginning of a serious discussion about the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence They transmitted the image in binary numbers as a series of ones and zeros representing white squares and black squares Numbers and scientific formulas begin the message followed by pictures of a DNA double helix the Arecibo Message had implications for age-old questions about our place in the universe “Today for the first time in history,” they write “[these questions] have entered into the realm of experimental science.” the project seemed fairly practical and straightforward They describe how radio is the “fastest and also by far the cheapest method” to send or receive messages across such long distances An understanding of radio astronomy even puts constraints on the best frequencies to use for such a message Drake and Sagan write that “it seems to us quite possible that one-way radio messages are being beamed at the earth at this moment by radio transmitters on planets in orbit around other stars.” They argue that we should be listening which involved building “an array of 1,500 radio antennas each 100 meters in diameter.” Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value" Drake and Sagan explain that the Arecibo Message isn’t the only message we’ve sent: our radio and television broadcasts have sent out a bubble of electromagnetic signals into space “expanding like a ripple from a disturbance in a pool of water and inadvertently carrying the news that human beings have achieved the capacity for interstellar discourse Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today. Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_3" ).setAttribute( "value" Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" The Arecibo Message was a brief binary-encoded communication transmitted into space from the Arecibo Observatory on November 16 intended to demonstrate human technological prowess to commemorate the 45th anniversary of this message the Arecibo Observatory initiated the New Arecibo Message competition our Boriken Voyagers team was recognized as the winner of the competition in August 2020 Although the primary objective of the competition was to conceptualize rather than transmit a message, the collapse of the Arecibo Telescope in December 2020 precluded any subsequent transmission efforts to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Arecibo Message this paper presents the Last Arecibo Message as originally developed for the Arecibo Telescope If the original message says “we are a form of life reaching out to connect” our message says “we are ready to explore the universe together.” The prospect of transmitting this or a similar message remains an open question The Last Arecibo Message is divided into seven sections (colored areas) with different components to decode ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran A Zinc decay was to blame for cable failures at the Arecibo Observatory which held the title of "world's largest radio telescope." They all happened at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico With a spherical reflector dish that was 305 meters (roughly 1000 feet) in diameter Arecibo held the title of world's largest radio telescope for over half a century — from its construction in 1963 until 2016 To the dismay of astronomers around the world Arecibo's reflector dish collapsed when support cables gave way leading to the eventual decommissioning of one of science's most fruitful instruments "After analyzing the data and the extensive and detailed forensic investigations commissioned by the University of Central Florida and the National Science Foundation (NSF) the committee consensus is that the root cause of the Arecibo Telescope's collapse was unprecedented and accelerated long-term zinc creep induced failure of the telescope's cable spelter sockets." The reports details how structural failure of the telescope likely began in 2017 when Hurricane Maria hit the Observatory which "subjected the Arecibo Telescope to winds between 105 and 118 mph … the winds of Hurricane Maria subjected the Arecibo Telescope's cables to the highest structural stress they had ever endured since it opened in 1963." inspections were conducted after the hurricane but no significant damage was deemed to have jeopardized the telescope's structural integrity repairs were still ordered — yet these repairs were delayed for years they were targeted "toward components and replacement of a main cable that ultimately never failed," which suggests the repairs would not have prevented the eventual collapse of the Observatory's reflector dish even if they weren't delayed leading the NSF to announce the decommissioning of the telescope through a controlled demolition causing the instrument platform to collapse into the dish itself The report continued to detail how hidden outer wire failures triggered the collapse which had fractured due to shear stress from zinc creep (or zinc decay) in the telescope's cable spelter sockets this issue was not identified during the post-Maria inspection which meant engineers hadn't considered the degradation of these mechanisms as a source of a potential future collapse Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com. Conor FeehlySocial Links NavigationContributing WriterConor Feehly is a New Zealand-based science writer He has earned a master's in science communication from the University of Otago His writing has appeared in Cosmos Magazine His writing largely covers topics relating to neuroscience and psychology although he also enjoys writing about a number of scientific subjects ranging from astrophysics to archaeology What would it be like living on Tatooine from 'Star Wars' This exoplanet orbiting twin suns could tell us A whole 'population' of minimoons may be lurking near Earth Scientists chased a falling spacecraft with a plane to understand satellite air pollution New center embarks on a mission to empower educators and students with cutting-edge STEM resources.   As technological innovation propels society into the future it becomes increasingly important to make science accessible Empowering individuals to understand the world around them fosters trust in science sparks curiosity and promotes scientific literacy It also helps put more people in the driver's seat to explore what matters to them and their community With this in mind, the new U.S. National Science Foundation Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education Computational Skills and Community Engagement (Arecibo C3 Center) is working to make science more accessible As the center prepares for its opening in 2025 a pilot phase is engaging local groups of students and educators High school and college faculty participated in a workshop in which they learned how they can incorporate the latest generation of DNA sequencing technology into their classrooms The NSF Arecibo C3 Center aims to bridge science across the STEM spectrum to empower people with computing and foster community around culturally relevant and inclusive values. The multidisciplinary educational center is being established at the site of the NSF Arecibo Observatory Historic District in Puerto Rico the center is focused on expanding collaborative education and research opportunities for educators and students in Puerto Rico and the U.S It will include a research laboratory and an interactive science center for exhibitions and educational outreach activities including science talks In preparation for its opening, the center will be inviting small groups of local students and educators to test the center's activities and exhibits The insights collected from this pilot phase will help shape the center's future "Co-creation is crucial for our programs at NSF Arecibo C3 This pilot phase will help us understand the communities we aim to serve and honor the observatory's legacy Our goal is to collaborate with Puerto Rico to revitalize this space for science and create a new landmark for global inspiration," said Jason Williams The "Summer of Nanopore Sequencing 2024" workshop invited high school and college faculty to learn about nanopore DNA sequencing and be trained in how to use this technology to study samples in their classrooms Nanopore DNA sequencing is one of the latest advancements in genetic technology It involves reading the code of a single DNA strand as it is pulled through extremely tiny nanopores in a membrane Each nanopore corresponds to its own electrode connected to a channel and sensor chip which measures the electric current that flows through the nanopore the current is disrupted to produce a characteristic "squiggle." This squiggle is then decoded using algorithms to determine the DNA sequence in real time A major advantage of this technology is the ability to produce much longer reads of the DNA sequence compared to previous generations This enables the analysis of complex DNA regions and provides a more detailed understanding of the molecular structure the MinION is now being brought into the classroom the workshop aimed to empower educators with the ability to turn their classrooms into personal genome sequencing labs regardless of location or access to equipment This was particularly important as many attendees were educators located in rural areas across Puerto Rico "The isolated space provides an uninterrupted focus to the workshop that I don't think would have been possible anywhere else It allowed me to concentrate on what was being taught in the workshop and learning as much as possible about nanopore sequencing," said one participant in response to a survey about the experience the center will collaborate with students and educators to trial other programming Plans also include redeveloping exhibition spaces to celebrate the site's history and reflect the diversity of STEM opportunities that will be developed moving forward National Science Foundation where she translates complex scientific research into engaging and accessible content for the public Her work aims to help audiences understand the significant discoveries and innovations funded by NSF and their societal benefits Tricia worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute she studied reproductive physiology for the conservation of endangered species Her involvement in animal conservation also provided her with the opportunity to take part in numerous educational outreach programs igniting her passion for science communication.  The U.S. National Science Foundation has announced that the official opening of the NSF Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education, Computational Skills, and Community Engagement (NSF Arecibo C3) will be moved to 2025. The opening will now coincide with NSF's 75th anniversary commemorations all year round marking a milestone that celebrates decades of advancing scientific discovery and innovation.   we can ensure that the center has the time it needs while taking advantage of a unique opportunity to launch during NSF's 75th anniversary — a significant year that reflects our long-standing commitment to scientific progress and STEM education."   This decision is driven by several factors including delays in the scheduling and transporting of essential equipment to the island and ongoing efforts to ensure the center meets the required standards for access and inclusivity.    Separate from the factors that led to this decision this revised schedule allows the Arecibo C3 team to make necessary arrangements and adjust their organizational structure following Universidad del Sagrado Corazón’s recent decision to conclude its engagement with the project This new structure will present new opportunities for institutional and organizational partnerships and science education and research at the site.    we are proud of the important contributions our team has made to the project so far We have successfully completed our first-year milestones and collaborations essential for the project’s success we formed a communication team and built partnerships with Ciencia Puerto Rico and other organizations These partnerships and structures have now been successfully initiated and the remaining institutions involved in the project will continue this important work," said Anuchka Ramos Arecibo C3 will continue to collaborate closely with students and educators to develop and refine programming across a wide range of STEM topics Although the center will remain closed to the public the community can expect continued engagement through invitation-only educational programs For ongoing updates, visit nsf.gov and www.areciboc3.org.  An aerial view of the massive radio dish at Arecibo Observatory after the telescope's collapse The dead telescope is still having an impact on science An illustration shows the signal from a distant pulsar being distorted as it passes through an interstellar cloud on its way to Earth The NANOGrav project detects gravitational waves via the close observation of an array of pulsars "Even years after the Arecibo Observatory's collapse its data continues to unlock critical information that can advance our understanding of the galaxy." Using data from the now-destroyed Arecibo radio telescope scientists from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute have unlocked the secrets of signals from "cosmic lighthouses" powered by dead stars The researchers investigated 23 pulsars, including 6 which had not been studied before. This data revealed patterns in pulsar signals showing how they were impacted by the passage through gas and dust that exists between stars, the so-called "interstellar medium." When the cores of massive stars rapidly collapse to create neutron stars they can create pulsars capable of spinning as fast as 700 times every second thanks to the conservation of angular momentum The radio wave distortions the team was interested in are known as diffractive interstellar scintillation (DISS) DISS is somewhat analogous to the patterns of rippling shadows seen at the bottom of a pool as light passes through the water above DISS is caused by charged particles in the interstellar medium that create distortions in radio wave signals traveling from pulsars to radio telescopes on Earth The team's investigation revealed that the bandwidths of pulsar signals were wider than current models of the universe suggest should be the case This further implied that current models of the interstellar medium may need to be revised The researchers found that when galactic structures such as the spiral arms of the Milky Way were accounted for This suggests that challenges in modeling the structure of our galaxy should be faced in order to continually update galactic structure models Understanding how signals from pulsars work is important to scientists because the ultraprecise periodic signals from pulsars can be used as a timing mechanism A better understanding of DISS could help refine the detection of gravitational waves by projects like NANOGrav — NASA's Hubble, Chandra space telescopes face possible budget cuts: report — New kind of pulsar may explain how mysterious 'black widow' systems evolve — Hear 'black widow' pulsar's song as it destroys companion "This work demonstrates the value of large, archived datasets," Sheikh said in a statement. "Even years after the Arecibo Observatory's collapse its data continues to unlock critical information that can advance our understanding of the galaxy and enhance our ability to study phenomena like gravitational waves." The team's research was published on Nov. 26 in The Astrophysical Journal. Robert LeaSocial Links NavigationSenior WriterRobert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K whose articles have been published in Physics World He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University A thousand stars are fleeing home in a hurry This iconic 'Star Wars' Rebel pilot helmet from the Battle of Hoth could fetch $400K at auction On November 16, 1974, astronomers used the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico to beam out the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately sent to space. They said the goal was to contact alien life. And some applauded it, but others didn’t. On the plus side, it reminded people that Earth likely isn’t the only planet in the Milky Way where intelligent life has evolved But others felt – if alien civilizations do exist out there – we shouldn’t call attention to ourselves The 2025 EarthSky Lunar Calendar is now available! A unique and beautiful poster-sized calendar. Keep up with all phases of the moon every night of the year. This message contained information about the basic chemicals of life and the structure of DNA it included Earth’s place in our solar system and even a stick figure of a human It took three minutes to send 1,679 bits of information, a snail’s pace compared to modern computer modems. And according to the SETI Institute: In fact, the 1974 signal went out in the direction of M13 a globular star cluster orbiting the center of our Milky Way galaxy it was chosen because it’s a large collection of stars and was available in the sky at the time and place of the ceremony Also, globular star clusters are very far away. For instance, M13 is about 25,000 light-years from Earth the 1974 signal is 50 light-years away from us the Arecibo radio telescope collapsed in 2020 when its 900-ton receiver platform came loose from its cables and fell onto the reflector dish more than 400 feet (120 meters) below Read more: Video shows Arecibo telescope crash Bottom line: Iconic Arecibo telescope is no longer operational, but its legacy lives on. Fifty years ago, on November 16, 1974, Arecibo sent our first intentional signal to space. What do you think? Should we be advertising our presence in space? 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On the 50th anniversary of the “Arecibo message,” we present a reflection on humankind’s first attempt to send a transmission to intelligent life in the cosmos By Rachel Feltman, Nadia Drake & Fonda Mwangi [CLIP: Sound of Arecibo message being sent] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly humanity sent an unprecedented message into the stars [CLIP: Frank Drake gives a speech on the day of the Arecibo transmission: “If we go as far away as Mars or the other planets and look back it is essentially impossible to know of human life on Earth a late astronomer and astrophysicist who was instrumental in sending what’s now known as the “Arecibo message.” Here to tell us more about humankind’s first attempts at finding intelligent life in the cosmos is freelance science journalist Nadia Drake.  Feltman: Thank you so much for joining us to chat today Feltman: Let’s start with some basic context for our listeners: What was Arecibo and what anniversary are we talking about today Nadia Drake: The Arecibo Observatory was formerly the world’s largest radio telescope And that was until China built their bigger radio telescope more recently but for many years it had been the largest telescope on Earth with a dish that spans 1,000 feet [305 meters] And it had a very powerful radar transmitter that they used to study bodies in the solar system In 1974 the observatory had just finished doing some upgrades to the facility that were going to turn it into a world-class observatory for astronomy One of the things they did was they replaced the reflector dish for the telescope and gave it a surface that would let it make observations at frequencies that were really useful for astronomers And the other thing they did was that they upgraded the transmitter and gave it more power And to commemorate that upgrade they decided to have a dedication ceremony and invited about 200 And at that ceremony they sent a message into space using the new [CLIP: Frank Drake gives a speech on the day of Arecibo transmission: “The message will take a little less than three minutes to send When it is finished the first words will already be three quarters the distance to the orbit of Mars.”] so this is the 50th anniversary of that message transmission and we’re gonna get more into the message itself could you tell us about your personal connection to the message is the person who designed the Arecibo message and he did that with a little help from some folks who were at Cornell University at the time so 50 years ago we sent this message out into space and your dad was instrumental in crafting it Nadia Drake: The message contained a lot of information about who we are the facility that actually sent it into space So in a sense it was basically an interstellar selfie [laughs] Nadia Drake: Dad sent an image of humans; he drew a kind of cartoony-looking drawing of a human and he included information about the chemical elements that make us who we are some of the biomolecules that make us who we are which was still a relatively recent discovery in 1974 and I think was on everybody’s minds when they’re thinking about And then he included a diagram of the solar system that had Earth kind of bumped up so it would tell anybody who looked at the image which planet we lived on So it was just a lot of information about humans where we are and some of the very basic building blocks that make us human Nadia Drake: [Laughs] It’s a really good question In a sense I think you can definitely say that this is the first time that we sent a message to the stars with the idea being that it could be received by an extraterrestrial civilization It is not the first deliberately designed message to leave Earth Soviet scientists had actually done that a few years before that using a planetary radar facility in Ukraine And they had sent words in Russian to the planet Venus And that message bounced off of Venus and came back to Earth where it was received by the audience that it was intended for more of a demonstration than a serious attempt is that Arecibo was also a demonstration of so it’s an interesting parallel between those two situations demonstrating the capability of a new facility means sending a message into space somehow [chuckles] what really distinguishes it for a lot of people was how much care was put into creating something that could maybe be interpreted by a species that had Could you tell us a little bit about how your dad accomplished that Nadia Drake: I love that you said it was crafted with care [laughs] I’m just gonna share that observation and he put a lot of thought into what it would say that he wanted to share information that would be useful for whomever detected it thinking that maybe they could be made of the same things that we are; they might not be but either way this would be an interesting scientific result for them So he didn’t wanna make the message completely on his own and he asked for help from some of the staff and the students that he was working with and he actually did get some help from some of the students One person who was a graduate student at the time at Cornell University—his name is Richard Isaacman and he did collaborate with Dad on creating some of the information that’s in the message when they hear about messages sent to the stars it—it’s hard to wrap their head around makes it at all possible for us to imagine that an alien would be able to encode it Nadia Drake: I think when you’re considering “How do you communicate with someone whose language you don’t speak?” .. Nadia Drake: The answer that Dad reached is using images that doesn’t require a real understanding of vocabulary or and he coded all of the information into that image using a binary code where every time there’s a 1 in the code Nadia Drake: And he sent 1,679—check me on that—bits [laughs] and when you arrange those in a grid of the right dimensions And along the top row it starts with the numbers one through 10 in binary which is kind of what you need to use to decode some of the information that comes farther down Feltman: So you wrote a piece for Scientific American where you recounted surfacing some of your dad’s notes and papers from this time Could you tell us a little bit about what you learned from those documents and from talking to other folks who were involved in sending the message and we found this original or very early draft of the message which was done on graph paper—it was just penciled in—and you can see that he’s working through some of the calculations there about how to do the programming There are notes in the file that show that he’s working out how to represent various elements in the periodic table And then he’s got some calculations that are—it’s him calculating how long it’s gonna take the message to get to the other planets in the solar system Jupiter—Pluto was still considered a planet then And what I learned that was probably the most surprising to me is that when I shared an image of that draft on social media it got a much larger response than I was expecting It was—so many people immediately knew what it was And it was a kind of fervency in response that I I hadn’t been anticipating ’cause growing up with the Arecibo message [laughs] it’s in our house—it’s a stained-glass window at my mom’s house now Nadia Drake: I just hadn’t been aware of how much importance it had in [the] collective consciousness of people who are interested in these things I think people are so fascinated by the idea of reaching out to extraterrestrial life How has that search evolved over the last half a century in 1960 Dad did the first scientific search for extraterrestrial civilizations and he was looking for radio waves that would be distinctly artificial in origin because that is what we use here to communicate So he was really using us on Earth as a basis for what we think we could expect to see from other civilizations as well And since then searches for extraterrestrial technologies—or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI—I would say has evolved in a way that includes many different kinds of signatures of extraterrestrial technologies SETI searches are also looking for optical flashes of laser light or the waste heat generated by energy-harvesting megastructures or really any kinds of weirdness in astronomical data that could be there I would say the search has broadened quite a bit to include not just technologies that are used in communicating but just any detectable technology at all and what do you think the future holds for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Nadia Drake: I hope it holds a discovery [laughs] Nadia Drake: I really wanna find that signal [laughs] I think what’s also really promising right now is that the search for “technosignatures,” or is really starting to be taken more seriously within the science community It’s not this kind of—people in the SETI community call it the “giggle factor” that used to impede progress in SETI “giggle factor” is fading away and SETI is starting to be taken seriously as a science and that’s an evolution in thought that I think has occurred over the period of time that I’ve been a science journalist—so really within the last 10 to 15 years we’ve started to see that Feltman: You mentioned a really fervent response to some of the What do you think it is about the Arecibo message that really just grips people Nadia Drake: Actually I’m really curious about what you think [laughs] I love what you said earlier about the message being almost like a just really sort of trying to encapsulate what we are and sending it out into the galaxy I think there’s something so universal about and I think when we’re talking about SETI we do really fundamentally want to not be alone and wanna be seen I think it feels so big to think about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence even if we don’t necessarily expect it to get us I love “existentially woozy.” [Laughs] ’cause I’m not—it’s not—it shouldn’t be scary a little bit of an overlap with some kind of spiritual ideas when you think about SETI and the fact that a lot of people think there might be answers out there: some truths the nature of reality and how we fit into it And that might fall out of the stars if we find the right beings to communicate with Feltman: Nadia, thank you so much for sharing this with us and for taking the time to chat. I’m sure our listeners will also really enjoy reading your piece on ScientificAmerican.com Feltman: That’s all for this week’s Friday Fascination We’ll be back on Monday with our science news roundup.  Today’s episode featured original reporting from Nadia Drake Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news [CLIP: Arecibo transmission complete and crowd cheering] Rachel Feltman is former executive editor of Popular Science and forever host of the podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week She previously founded the blog Speaking of Science for the Washington Post Fonda Mwangi is a multimedia editor at Scientific American She previously worked as an audio producer at Axios She holds a master’s degree in journalism and public affairs from American University in Washington Rachel Feltman is former executive editor of Popular Science and forever host of the podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week Fonda Mwangi is a multimedia editor at Scientific American A scathing new report points to unclear protocols and multiple failures to raise alarms at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico before the collapse of the site's radio telescope in 2020 The dramatic 2020 collapse of the famous Arecibo Telescope was 39 months in the making The just-released National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report found an "alarming" lack of documented concern about the telescope's safety and stability after it was damaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017 It also found that the failure of the cables that ultimately snapped could be traced to the sockets that held the cables in place and it broadcast Earth's first attempt to contact extraterrestrials — now known as the "Arecibo Message" — in 1974 But the new report finds that the initial trouble began well before that year which made landfall on Puerto Rico on Sept subjected the telescope to the highest wind loads it had ever experienced inspections revealed that some of the cables holding up the telescope had slipped from their sockets the committee tasked with investigating the failure wrote in the report Related: Collapsed Arecibo telescope offers near-Earth asteroid warning from beyond the grave This may have been because the loads on the cables were still considered to be within a safe range and because the type of socket connections at Arecibo had not been a point of failure in similar cables in the past Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox there was no clear guidance for operators regarding when to raise alarms about structural stability the report's authors found: Each telescope upgrade added new structures and equipment but there were not sufficient updates to the operating instructions and manuals covering how to properly maintain these additions The failure may have also stemmed from an unexpected weakness in the zinc connectors that held up the telescope cables – Legacy of shattered alien-seeking Arecibo telescope will live on for millions of years – Collapsed Arecibo telescope offers near-Earth asteroid warning from beyond the grave — Radio signal from 8 billion light-years away could reveal the secrets of the universe's 'dark age' "There are no previous reports of such spelter socket failure in more than a century of their use," the committee wrote The only explanation the committee could come up with was that perhaps the strength of the electromagnetic radiation at a telescope the size of Arecibo may have weakened the sockets over many decades That might have implications for the construction and maintenance of other large radio telescopes The investigation also indicated that it was pure luck that the telescope's failures occurred at a time of day when no staff or visitors were in danger "The consequences of a structural failure of the Arecibo Telescope were not seriously considered in decision-making during design and operation or in extending the telescope's life," the committee concluded there was no formal consideration that the health and safety of the workers and the public were at risk in the event of a structural failure." Stephanie PappasSocial Links NavigationLive Science ContributorStephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California Doomed Soviet spacecraft tumbling toward Earth may already have its parachute out Doomed Soviet satellite from 1972 will tumble uncontrollably to Earth next week — and it could land almost anywhere 1,800-year-old warhorse cemetery held remains of a beloved horse — and a man considered an 'outsider' to Roman society The Ohio State University Big Ear radio telescope detected in 1977 the Wow one of the most famous and intriguing signals of extraterrestrial origin is a new project that aims to find similar signals in archived data from the Arecibo Observatory we observed many targets of interest at 1 to 10 GHz with the 305-meter telescope Here we present our first results of drift scans made between February and May 2020 at 1420 MHz and bandwidth of these observations are similar to those used to detect the Wow We report the detection of narrowband signals (10 kHz) near the hydrogen line similar to the Wow although two-orders of magnitude less intense and in multiple locations these signals are easily identifiable as due to interstellar clouds of cold hydrogen (HI) in the galaxy Signal was caused by sudden brightening from stimulated emission of the hydrogen line due to a strong transient radiation source such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR) These are very rare events that depend on special conditions and alignments where these clouds might become much brighter for seconds to minutes The original source or the cloud might not be detectable depending on the sensitivity of the telescope Signal might be determined by searching for transient radio sources behind the cold hydrogen clouds in the corresponding region Our hypothesis explains all observed properties of the Wow proposes a new source of false positives in technosignature searches Signal could be the first recorded event of an astronomical maser flare in the hydrogen line Thank you!We have emailed you a PDF version of the article you requested You can also addnewsletters@iflscience.comto your safe senders list to ensure you never miss a message from us IFLScience Home50 Years Ago We Sent A Message Toward Stars Beyond Our Galaxy- This Is What It SaidComplete the form below to listen to the audio version of this article IFLScience needs the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time For information on how to unsubscribe, as well as our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, check out ourPrivacy Policy IFLScience HomeJoin for Exclusive Dr. Alfredo Carpineti Senior Staff Writer & Space Correspondent FacebookemailAlfredo (he/him) has a PhD in Astrophysics on galaxy evolution and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces. FacebookemailEditedbyJohannes Van ZijlJohannes Van Zijl FacebookemailJohannes has a MSci in Neuroscience from King’s College London and serves as the Managing Director at IFLScience The Arecibo message is simple but packed with information the incredible Arecibo radio telescope was used not to receive radio light from the universe but to send out a message to the stars and even the attempt at communicating with aliens remain as influential and somewhat controversial as ever First of all, we need to stress that this message was never a true attempt at communicating with an extraterrestrial civilization This interstellar message was more of a technology demonstration sent to mark the remodeling of the telescope The message has been sent towards the Messier 13 a globular cluster of up to half a million stars packed together across 145 light-years It is located over 22,000 light-years from Earth and even assuming there’s a planet with an intelligent civilization there it is not even certain that it will be in the right position to get the message when it arrives in 222 centuries and they were keen to communicate some crucial stuff about humanity The first part of the message is simply the numbers 1 to 10 in binary That should be quite straightforward and be useful in the second part of the message Five elements out of the 118 currently known in the periodic table were described In fact, the third portion of the message is the chemical formulae of the molecules that make DNA followed by a graphic recreation of the double helix the structure on which all our genetics are based The next bit of the information is the estimate of the Earth's population at the time - 4.3 billion people as well as a stick figure of a human with the number 14 Once that is multiplied by the wavelength of the message you get 1.76m or 5 ft 9.4 inches the average height of an adult male in the US It was certainly a choice to pick an average excluding women or people from beyond the U.S A simple schematic gives the then nine planets including Pluto The position of the Earth is off from the rest of the system to make it clear where the message comes from The telescope that sent this message was severely damaged and was shut down a few years ago  so the message has already survived its source Space and PhysicsChina’s New Space Laser Can Find A Satellite 130,000 Kilometers Away – Even During The Day19 hours ago15link to article AstronomyAstronomers Find Odd Radio Signal Coming From Fracture In Milky Way's "Cosmic Snake"19 hours ago464link to article Biofluorescence vs Bioluminescencelink to article T. Rex Leather, Glow-In-The-Dark Gas Clouds, And Musical Sea Lionslink to article © 2025 IFLScience. All Rights Reserved. RSS Powerful electromagnetic radiation from an enormous radio telescope in Puerto Rico may have fast-tracked structural damage that led to the instrument's collapse in 2020 The telescope even had its proverbial 15 minutes of fame with cameos in the sci-fi film Contact a 900-ton platform and four-story dome of secondary reflectors hanging over the receiver fell more than 400 feet and crashed into the main dish dashing the hopes of astronomers around the globe who relied on it for their research.  Previous investigations into the disaster attributed the structural failure to slow "zinc creep," the tendency for zinc to deform over time under tension Sockets filled with zinc anchored a set of cables holding the main platform over the reflector dish the zinc lost its grip and allowed several of the supporting wires to slip out.  But the Arecibo Observatory collapse was unlike anything that had ever happened before It is believed to be the first documented case of a long-term zinc failure and the zinc deformed at a load less than half the sockets' normal strength.  'Why was there excessive zinc creep at such loading?' Such a failure had never been reported previously in over a century of widespread zinc spelter socket successful use," Roger L chair of the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine committee assigned to study the causes of the telescope's collapse But the new report criticizes other investigations for not including several previously observed failure patterns at the site leading up to the event and for not providing explanations for them The committee asserts there were warning signs that structural engineers didn't heed.  labeled the accident "one of the most publicized and baffling failures of the modern era." The damage, according to the committee, began with Hurricane Maria inspectors saw "large and progressive" cable pull-outs Those discoveries should have prompted immediate repairs but the inspectors hadn't accounted for how fast that damage would progress.  causing a 100-foot gash on the dish and damaging the suspended platform Just 12 days before the whole telescope fell apart the National Science Foundation announced it would be closing the facility due to its dangerous state of disrepair.  a fast-spinning dead star core left over after a supernova The discovery has provided a new "space laboratory" for studying gravitation.  Despite its perilous location in the Caribbean the telescope had survived many hurricanes without issue over its 57 years of operation The committee thinks electromagnetic waves from the Arecibo telescope itself could have sped up the zinc deformity Electroplasticity is a phenomenon that can occur when an electric current passes through a material causing it to become more flexible and lose its original shape.  The group of subject-matter experts has recommended that the foundation give the remaining sockets and cables from the site to the research community for studies into this hypothesis to capture hard evidence.  there was not enough data available to prove our explanation," McCarthy said in a statement "It is simply the most plausible hypothesis based on the data we do have." It's too late to help Arecibo. Instead of rebuilding the observatory, the foundation is funding a new science, technology, engineering, and math education center at the site But understanding what happened could prevent similar damage to other facilities in the future The famous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico collapsed due to a combination of decayed zinc in the telescope’s cable sockets and previous damage from Hurricane Maria according to a report published by the National Academies of Sciences The massive radio telescope’s collapse in December 2020 marked the end of a prolific source of radio astronomy data the root cause of the telescope’s collapse was “unprecedented and accelerated long-term zinc creep induced failure.” That failure occurred in the telescope’s cable sockets—crucial bits of infrastructure for supporting the telescope’s 900-ton platform which hung above the radio dish The telescope’s collapse in 2020 was dramatic as it was swift The cables suspending the telescope’s platform above the its 1,000-foot (304.8-meter) dish snapped causing the platform to plummet down through the radio dish The catastrophic collapse took less than 10 seconds thus ending the venerated observatory’s 57 years of operation in northern Puerto Rico and aided in humankind’s search for life beyond Earth “The lack of documented concern from the contracted engineers about the inconsequentiality of cable pullouts or the safety factors between Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the failure is alarming.” the report found the collapse began well before the fateful day in December 2020 The committee concluded that the “failure sequence” took 39 months and began with the effects of Hurricane Maria in September 2017 Inspections following the storm found evidence of cable slippage but wasn’t investigated further or addressed by anyone “The lack of documented concern from the contracted engineers about the inconsequentiality of cable pullouts or the safety factors between Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the failure is alarming,” the committee wrote “in over a century of successful use prior to the Arecibo Telescope’s collapse all the forensic investigations agreed that such a spelter socket failure had never been reported.” The report went on: “The only hypothesis the committee could develop that provides a plausible but unprovable answer … is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope’s uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment.” In other words the sockets’ role in suspending such a powerful radio transmitter somehow contributed to the 2020 catastrophe The site may never again collect radio data but it will—in some form—continue its legacy as an epicenter of astronomical discovery ' + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.webview_notification_text + ' " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_title + " " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_text + " Fourteen slots for Paris 2024 are still available and at stake in this thrilling competition #RoadtoParis2024 #OlympicQualifiers #Surfing Secure your spot now for an experience of lifetime at the Winter Olympic Games in the magical Italy IFLScience HomeSite of Famous Arecibo Telescope Seeks To Move From Astronomy To EducationComplete the form below to listen to the audio version of this article FacebookemailStephen has a science degree with a major in physics, an arts degree with majors in English Literature and History and Philosophy of Science and a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication. FacebookemailEditedbyFrancesca BensonFrancesca Benson Francesca Benson is a Copy Editor and Staff Writer with a MSci in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham When Arecibo was operating it attracted tourists who might have been interested in a science center but less likely to come just for the memories Image Credit: Zombie Bunny/Shutterstock.com A science education center is scheduled to open soon at the site of the mighty Arecibo telescope and pilot phase programs were run there over the summer some still have concerns that this is a token gesture that will fail to take the great telescope’s place Astronomers are also waiting to hear about the fate of smaller instruments at the site the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $5.5 million in funding over five years to create an education center at the site of the former observatory the center will offer Puerto Ricans and tourists alike an opportunity for to learn about many areas of science The project is to be called Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education the NSF is honoring the astronomical tradition of giving names to projects that can be reduced to a catchy acronym or other shortening.  "The new educational center builds on the great scientific, educational and cultural legacy of the Arecibo Observatory and is closely aligned with NSF's goal to create STEM opportunities everywhere," said the NSF’s James L. Moore III in a statement computer and natural sciences in Puerto Rico and beyond."  The center will be run by two Puerto Rican institutions (The University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras and Unversidad de Sagrado Corazon) known as the home of eight Nobel Prize winning geneticists undecided about its relationship to the United States as a whole the observatory was both a generator of economic activity and a symbol of partnership between the island and the national government.  around a million dollars a year for five years doesn’t look like a convincing commitment whether or not you agree with the decision to go scientifically broad rather than focus on astronomy.  When the announcement was made, Professor Ubaldo Córdova Figueroa of UPR Mayagüez questioned whether students would come to a remote part of the island without the draw of the mighty dish. “You don’t have that asset now,” Córdova Figueroa told Nature at the time Former director of the site Olga Figueroa Miranda questioned in the same article if the funds were sufficient to create a center people would travel to The website itself is promoting the pilot project for school students, which finished more than three months ago. If the center is to open in November, as promised in a May NSF announcement Arecibo’s future could indicate NSF's commitment to science and science education in Puerto Rico not just the parts of the country that get to vote for Congress AstronomyAstronomers Find Odd Radio Signal Coming From Fracture In Milky Way's "Cosmic Snake"19 hours ago466link to article Eos The giant radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory was destroyed twice: the first time deliberately to save the planet the second time as a result of natural disasters—making it harder to save Earth in the future It played a part in studies of Earth’s ionosphere attempts to detect signs of—and send messages to—potential alien civilizations “Asteroid or comet impacts are maybe the one natural disaster that you can prevent.” “Asteroid or comet impacts are maybe the one natural disaster that you can prevent,” said Patrick Taylor who heads the radar astronomy division of the U.S National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory a research organization that manages several telescope facilities around the world Though we can’t prevent largely erratic disasters caused by earthquakes extraterrestrial rocks follow predictable—and possibly changeable—orbits around the Sun you can think about a mission to it,” Taylor said respectively) will discover hundreds of NEOs every year all of which will need follow-up radar observations Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday The catastrophic loss of Arecibo highlights how much we needed it for planetary defense and how problematic it is to rely on any single observatory for this essential work Next-generation radar proposals involve multiple telescopes for sending and receiving signals as well as exploiting modern technology to make it possible to carry on when components fail comparing the radio waves received to those sent allows researchers to measure the position and speed of objects precisely “Every other technique in astronomy depends on reflected sunlight or emitted radiation,” said Marina Brozovic a radar astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the echo comes back carrying lots of valuable information from super precise measurement of where that object is in space to physical characteristics [like] how fast it’s spinning.” The time between sending and receiving radio waves reveals the distance whereas shifts in wavelength provide velocity data Polarized radio waves—imagine a type of corkscrew motion for the beams—yield information about the surface of the target object such as its roughness and how metallic it is which are too small and fast moving for optical imaging “Optical telescopes don’t get enough data to constrain the orbit without radar You don’t want to lose a potentially hazardous object!” Arecibo pioneered the use of radar on asteroids by measuring the orbit of the large asteroid Eros in 1975 and provided the first direct radar image of Castalia in 1989 Both of these NEOs had been identified using other methods (Eros was discovered in 1898) but radar provided detailed information unavailable other ways showed it to be a “contact binary”: a peanut-shaped body consisting of two asteroids stuck together or a single asteroid in the process of being pulled apart [NEOs] are not just a little dot moving in space,” Rivera-Valentín said “We can tell the entire shape of it: Is it actually spheroidal Radar also has allowed astronomers to identify asteroid moons: smaller bodies separated from and orbiting the main asteroid researchers can use basic physics to obtain asteroid mass which then reveals density and clues about composition “One out of six asteroids could be contact binaries, and you can’t really tell those apart from ellipsoidal asteroids just from optical observations,” said Anne Virkki of the University of Helsinki who formerly headed a radar astronomy research group at Arecibo She emphasized the importance of getting the shape of asteroids to send spacecraft to study them scientifically or to attempt to redirect them away from Earth then you can get also gravitational models It’s very different for a spacecraft to orbit something that’s spherical radar astronomy does come with some drawbacks Light spreads out as it travels through space resulting in greater attenuation the farther away the source is Attenuation literally gets radar going and coming: The beam arriving at the target is diminished by the square of the distance; then its return to Earth sees the signal dropping off by the square of the distance again this means an object twice as far away will have a radar signal 1/16 as strong The ngRADAR proposal is designed to mitigate the attenuation problem The GBT is the world’s largest fully steerable telescope which means it can be pointed at targets of interest Beyond updating the telescope’s amplifiers ngRADAR will use the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to receive the returning radar signal The array consists of ten 25-meter radio telescopes distributed from the Virgin Islands to Hawaii which act together as a single giant observatory Using the VLBA will increase the sensitivity of radar observations mitigating many of the issues with signal drop-off and enabling astronomers to get size and rotation data from more distant asteroids than before Another drawback to radar astronomy is power—a radar observatory requires a lot more power than a normal telescope because it sends signals rather than just receiving them That problem is compounded by observatories relying on Cold War era technology “Arecibo used and Goldstone still use something called klystrons which are big vacuum tube amplifiers,” Taylor said the klystrons need to be huge: 2 meters (6 feet) tall and weighing hundreds of kilograms (thousands of pounds) You can often lose fifty or even a hundred percent of your capability if they fail,” he explained Next-generation radar proposals involve solid-state amplifiers called monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs which produce less power than klystrons but are much smaller and more robust to failure MMICs are like multiple LEDs in your metaphorical flashlight instead of a single halogen bulb: less bright but advantageous in other ways “Instead of having one or two big components you have thousands of [amplifiers] built into a larger array,” Taylor said Until ngRADAR or similar projects begin operation a single observatory is carrying the entire burden of radio astronomy the lone hero in the breach of planetary defense “Goldstone was always complementary to Arecibo,” said Brozovic who has been performing radar observations there since 2007 “Arecibo was about 15 times more sensitive than Goldstone is we are a fully steerable antenna that covers about eighty percent of the sky We observe at Goldstone about 50 near-Earth asteroids every year.” In other words, astronomers can point the telescope at the objects of interest, whereas Arecibo was set into the ground and required its targets to pass overhead. Goldstone demonstrated its responsiveness in 2022, when the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission deliberately slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos “The radar observations gave us a rough estimate of the [orbit] change less than a day after the impact,” said Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University who was one of the scientific leads on DART You know where Dimorphos is supposed to be and you see it in a different place in the radar observations.” Goldstone can see more of the sky than Arecibo could but potentially hazardous asteroids could come from any direction including regions where the observatory cannot see researchers have begun using the Australia-based Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex which is identical to the Goldstone dish and also primarily serves NASA spacecraft communications those two won’t be able to keep up with new NEO discoveries Goldstone will be shut down entirely in 2026 for needed upgrades—leaving Earth completely without a radar observatory “You want to have a backup system,” Rivera-Valentín said adding that the problem isn’t lack of awareness but lack of funding The U.S. Congress passed the George E. Brown, Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act in 2006 legally obligating NASA to identify every asteroid larger than 100 meters “That was supposed to be completed like a decade ago but it didn’t have the funding and the facilities to make it happen,” Taylor said “That’s where Rubin and NEO Surveyor are going to come in but if you don’t follow up [the NEOs] and secure their orbits so that you know where they are in the future When it begins scientific operations in early 2025, the 8.5-meter Vera C. Rubin Observatory will scan a huge swath of the sky, looking for any changes from night to night. Researchers estimate the data could include over a million new asteroid detections within the first 6 months as well as possible hazardous asteroids and comets The need for next-generation radar observatories convincing governments to invest has proven challenging Scientists in the United States have struggled to keep Arecibo and GBT operational even with the support of a congressional mandate under the George E China has proposed building its own radar system that uses arrays of emitters as well as receivers might cost as much as building much of the U.S Pooling resources to make an international planetary defense network would make sense but that scale of cooperation remains rare in the space industry such dogged independence is as much a Cold War relic as the klystrons: Arecibo was originally designed to assist with ballistic missile deterrence by the U.S with scientific applications following later ngRADAR is being developed in collaboration with defense contractor Raytheon They need the political will to get them built which is the hardest part of getting projects started.” because these kinds of telescopes are expensive,” Virkki said “They need the political will to get them built which is why ngRADAR supporters are taking a different tack in pursuing development ngRADAR is “not creating brand new facilities which makes it attractive to the people who pay for it,” Taylor said “It gives the Green Bank Telescope and the VLBA another use potentially bringing in other stakeholders who would be interested in keeping the facilities going.” the original radar astronomy program was a Cold War relic Detecting potentially dangerous asteroids is not a job for a single telescope The next generations of radar observatories will expand Earth’s planetary defense to give us hopefully enough warning to preserve the world —Matthew R. Francis (@DrMRFrancis) 19 July 2024: This story has been updated to clarify identified NEOs and Goldstone‘s capabilities Home → Science → News The fall of the radio telescope was the result of many overlooked warning signs But its collapse wasn’t the sudden disaster we’ve been made to think. A recently released report by the National Academies of Sciences preventable failure that was years in the making Hurricane Maria delivered a devastating blow to Puerto Rico Winds exceeding 100 mph battered the facility exposing weaknesses that would prove fatal The damage caused by the hurricane started a chain of events including what engineers describe as “zinc creep” — a previously undocumented phenomenon that ultimately brought the telescope down The cables holding up Arecibo’s 900-ton platform began slipping from their sockets in the years following the hurricane Inspections recorded the slippage but contracted external engineers and consultants did not flag it as a serious threat compounded by the facility’s aging structure and missed opportunities for maintenance The first major warning came in August 2020 when an auxiliary cable failed it was clear the platform couldn’t be safely repaired But before officials could proceed with its decommissioning It took less than 10 seconds to destroy what had been 57 years of groundbreaking scientific work The investigation into the collapse of Arecibo operated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been described as one of the most baffling in modern engineering At the heart of the issue were the zinc spelter sockets These essential components anchor steel cables by filling them with molten zinc It’s a method that has worked for more than a century since the technique was invented The report suggests that the high levels of electromagnetic radiation from the observatory’s powerful radio transmitter may have contributed to the zinc’s failure “It opens up opportunities for exploiting it for beneficial uses as well,” Habib Tabatabai, a structural engineer on the committee, told Astronomy the interaction between the radio waves and the material likely sped up its decay no structural engineers had anticipated it The discovery of this behavior at Arecibo means engineers must now consider the possibility of similar failures in other structures that use zinc spelter sockets While Hurricane Maria triggered the collapse sequence The ‘sudden’ collapse of Arecibo wasn’t sudden at all as the researchers found that the “failure sequence” traced to 39 months before the event “The lack of documented concern from the contracted engineers about the inconsequentiality of cable pullouts or the safety factors between Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the failure is alarming,” the committee wrote The report concludes that with proper maintenance and a faster response to the signs of cable slippage Arecibo might have been saved — at least for a while But by the time Arecibo’s structural issues came to light and the structural problems were misunderstood “None of the proposed repairs would have saved the Arecibo Telescope from collapse,” the report concludes The National Science Foundation plans to transform the site of the observatory into an education center focused on STEM disciplines though the opening has been delayed until 2025 The new center will honor Arecibo’s legacy while ensuring that future generations learn from its groundbreaking discoveries — and its tragic fall As engineers continue to study Arecibo’s collapse they hope that what they learn will not only prevent similar failures but also open new possibilities for the future of materials science and structural engineering “It’s an opportunity to improve understanding,” Tabatabai said the radio silence over Arecibo is a stark reminder of what disasters await when some signals are missed © 2007-2025 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science © 2007-2025 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science Lobas de Arecibo clinched the Puerto Rican Women's Baseball League championship for the fourth consecutive year with a 3-1 victory over the Estrellas del Guamaní from Guayama in the five-game series Lobas secured their 13th title in 15 seasons cementing an unparalleled dynasty in the Puerto Rico Baseball Federation Lobas secured the title with back to back victories star pitcher Janiliz Rivera was dominant on the mound pitching a complete game with three strikeouts and allowing only three hits who went 3-for-3 with two RBIs and two runs scored Rivera was named the Most Valuable Player of the Final Series after winning two of the three games without allowing any runs with effective relief appearances from Noelia de Jesús and Yedlimar de Jesús This championship marks the second title for manager Diamilette Quiles who received the championship trophy from José Rafael Torres Sitemap Media Data Protection Contacts Avenue Général-Guisan, 45 CH-1009 Pully | Switzerland The WBSC is recognised as the sole competent authority in Baseball and Softball by the International Olympic Committee A team of scientists from the Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo believe they may have finally solved the 47-year-old mystery of the infamous “Wow! Signal.” Detected by the Ohio State University Big Ear Telescope on August 15th Signal got its name because astronomer Jerry R Ehman was so impressed he wrote “WOW” in the signal printout’s margins the signal has continued to fascinate the scientific community including the possibility that it may have been sent by an extraterrestrial civilization light years from Earth due to its high power various efforts to detect a repeat of the signal which had a frequency and duration that didn’t match any known natural phenomenon leaving the exact nature and origin of the potentially artificial signal unsolved Several efforts in the ensuing decades have tried to offer potentially natural explanations for the signal those attempts have also come up short of providing a definitive solution Signal was indeed of extraterrestrial origin and his colleagues say that the vast amount of data they collected with the Arecibo’s iconic 305-meter telescope before it collapsed in 2020 as well as additional data collected by the facility’s 12-meter telescope since 2023 has led them to a potentially ‘astronomical’ solution to this enduring mystery Signal may have been caused by a unique astrophysical event: the sudden brightening of a cold hydrogen cloud due to stimulated emission from a transient strong radiation source such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR),” Méndez told The Debrief “These rare events might cause hydrogen clouds to momentarily shine much brighter potentially explaining the fleeting nature of the Wow Professor Méndez explained that the original intent of their new research effort was to look for signals similar to the Wow Signal around various celestial objects that may have been captured and archived by the 305-meter telescope This included scans performed in the 1GHz to 10GHz range between 2017 and 2020 With a long list of impressive astronomical accomplishments that Méndez says “contributed to numerous groundbreaking discoveries in radio astronomy and planetary radar,” the 305-meter telescope became world famous after it was featured in the 1997 film Contact based on the book by astronomer Carl Sagan and starring Academy Award-winning actor Jodie Foster The team’s search of the 305-meter telescope’s archived data was enhanced by new data collected by the facility’s 12-meter telescope which began scanning the area around red dwarf stars with potentially habitable planets at 8 GHz starting in 2023 the effort found numerous signals similar to the Wow Signal within the 305-meter telescope data including signals near the 1420 MHz hydrogen line have revealed similar narrowband signals near the hydrogen line Since the team’s findings were so similar to those of the WOW signal that it may have solved the 47-year-old mystery Méndez told The Debrief they ultimately decided to forgo plans to release their research at the beginning of the Summer they announced their potentially historic findings on the 47th anniversary of the Big Ear telescope’s infamous detection “Our initial plan was to release the project activities by the end of June,” Méndez said in May so now it’s more about publishing the results So we decided that the 47th anniversary of the Wow Signal may have disappointed those hoping for a long-distance call from E.T. Méndez’s team says the signal was still historic They believe that finding similar signals near the hydrogen line could aid future efforts to locate extraterrestrial civilizations living on distant habitable planets Signal was likely the first recorded instance of maser-like emission of the hydrogen line,” Méndez explained “This hypothesis may redefine our understanding of such signals and guide future searches for extraterrestrial life.” Before publishing their results in a peer-reviewed journal, Méndez says they have made their initial draft of the paper available to outside researchers via their website, The Arecibo WOW! (AWOW) technosignature research project. Signal’ is currently being refined based on feedback from the scientific community and will soon be submitted for peer review to an astrophysical journal,” he explained The team also says these findings are just a “first phase” for AWOW which will continue to scan their archived data for similar signals For those hoping to learn more about the history and potential significance of the WOW Signal the professor offered his followers on X a little homework I recommend watching the #CoolWorlds podcast “The Wow! Signal After 45 Years” for tomorrow’s results. https://t.co/behOMnem1Y https://t.co/Upgqe3SDNS — Prof. Abel Méndez 🔭 🔬 (@ProfAbelMendez) August 14, 2024 a database of potentially habitable worlds.” Méndez says he will continue searching for potentially habitable exoplanets as part of the PHL’s primary mission the PHL’s research “focuses on the conditions allowing habitable environments and the potential for life beyond Earth.” detecting a signal from a distant civilization would undoubtedly change history Méndez admits that their latest research’s viable natural solution to one of astronomy’s most enduring mysteries will be hard to beat “This is the coolest project I worked on,” he told The Debrief Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org. MIAMI (FIBA Americas League) - Puerto Rican side Capitanes de Arecibo began theirFIBA Americas League Group B campaign in style as they edged out Mexicans Fuerza Regia 96-93.\r\n\r\nThe team from Arecibo were aided by good offensive work led by Roger Washington, while Buster Figueroa Sepulveda scored 22 points and ... The team from Arecibo were aided by good offensive work led by Roger Washington while Buster Figueroa Sepulveda scored 22 points and .. |  En Español  |   As excitement builds for the grand opening of the new U.S. National Science Foundation Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education, Computational Skills, and Community Engagement (NSF Arecibo C3) we look forward to engaging communities from across Puerto Rico and welcoming everyone to a center that will spark a passion for STEM and inspire future generations of scientists and researchers."  This phase will be conducted by invitation only via focus group activities in the summer the center will remain closed to the public The insights collected from this pilot phase will help shape the center's future as it approaches its anticipated opening celebration in November 2024 An investment of $5 million over five years was announced last September spearheaded by a collaboration between Universidad del Sagrado Corazón; University of Puerto Rico Baltimore County; and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Arecibo C3 will feature a research laboratory and an interactive science center that will focus on scientific themes This will be presented through exhibitions educators and the general public.   The center aims to uphold and extend the Arecibo Observatory's legacy of leadership within Puerto Rico and the STEM community It aims to expand student research and workforce development opportunities foster professional development and support collaborative research between faculty One of the standout features of the science center will be the "Arecibo Observatory Legacy Exhibition," celebrating the observatory's contributions to astronomy and scientific discovery.  NSF Arecibo C3 will work with students and educators to trial programming that will connect with a broad set of science These include interactive molecular biology and genomics workshops community-focused computing and convergent research and teaching on climate change and biodiversity Plans also include redeveloping exhibition spaces to celebrate the site's history and reflect the diversity of STEM opportunities that will be developed moving forward.  "Co-creation is vital to the programs we have envisioned at NSF Arecibo C3 and this pilot phase will allow us to understand the curiosity and interests within the communities we will serve We feel a deep commitment to honoring the legacy of the observatory and now the goal is to work with all of Puerto Rico to bring new life and opportunities to this space for science creating a new landmark that people worldwide can continue to be inspired by," said Jason Williams NSF will highlight the diverse programs and on-site activities taking place during the pilot phase on social media behind-the-scenes glimpses into preparations all aimed at building excitement leading up to the November opening Follow NSF on social media to stay updated on the latest news and announcements as the countdown to the anticipated grand opening of NSF Arecibo C3 in November begins Visit www.areciboc3.org for opportunities to get involved and be part of this transformative initiative A medida que aumenta el entusiasmo por la gran inauguración del nuevo Centro de Arecibo para la Educación Científica Culturalmente Relevante e Inclusiva, Habilidades Computacionales y Participación Comunitaria (NSF Arecibo C3), prevista para noviembre de 2024 la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias de los Estados Unidos se complace en anunciar el inicio de la fase piloto este verano el cual involucrará a pequeños grupos de estudiantes y educadores locales para probar las actividades y exhibiciones del centro "Estamos encantados de anunciar la fase piloto de NSF Arecibo C3 lo que marca un paso significativo hacia la realización de la visión de NSF de un centro científico dinámico abierto a todos "Mientras nos preparamos para la gran inauguración a finales de este año esperamos dar la bienvenida a comunidades de todo Puerto Rico a un centro que despertará la pasión por STEM e inspirará a futuras generaciones de científicos e investigadores" Esta fase se llevará a cabo únicamente por invitación a través de actividades de grupos de enfoque durante el verano Durante este periodo el centro permanecerá cerrado al público Los conocimientos recopilados en esta fase piloto ayudarán a dar forma al futuro del centro a medida que se acerca su celebración de inauguración prevista en noviembre de 2024.  En septiembre pasado se anunció una inversión de $5 millones encabezada por una colaboración entre la Universidad del Sagrado Corazón; Universidad de Puerto Rico condado de Baltimore; y el Laboratorio Cold Spring Harbor NSF Arecibo C3 contará con un laboratorio de investigación y un centro científico interactivo que se concentrará en temas científicos Esto se presentará a través de exposiciones películas y actividades de enriquecimiento para niños El centro tiene como objetivo preservar y ampliar el legado del Observatorio de Arecibo dentro de Puerto Rico y la comunidad STEM Su objetivo es ampliar la investigación estudiantil y las oportunidades de desarrollo de la fuerza laboral fomentar el desarrollo profesional y apoyar la investigación colaborativa entre profesores maestros K-12 y estudiantes en Puerto Rico y Estados Unidos Una de las características destacadas del centro científico será la "Exposición del Legado del Observatorio de Arecibo" que celebrará las contribuciones del observatorio a la astronomía y los descubrimientos científicos.  NSF Arecibo C3 trabajará con estudiantes y educadores para probar una programación que se conectará con un amplio conjunto de temas de ciencia Estos incluyen talleres interactivos de biología molecular y genómica informática centrada en la comunidad e investigación y enseñanza convergentes sobre el cambio climático y la biodiversidad Los planes también incluyen la remodelación de espacios de exhibición para celebrar la historia del sitio y reflejar la diversidad de oportunidades STEM que se desarrollarán en el futuro.  "La cocreación es vital para los programas que hemos imaginado en NSF Arecibo C3 y esta fase piloto nos permitirá comprender la curiosidad los talentos y los intereses dentro de las comunidades a las que serviremos Sentimos un profundo compromiso de honrar el legado del observatorio y ahora el objetivo es trabajar con todo Puerto Rico para traer nueva vida y oportunidades a este espacio para la ciencia creando un nuevo hito en el que la gente de todo el mundo pueda seguir inspirándose" NSF destacará los diversos programas y actividades que se llevarán a cabo durante la fase piloto en las redes sociales preparativos y testimonios de los participantes todos dirigidos a generar entusiasmo antes de la inauguración en noviembre.  Siga a NSF en las redes sociales para mantenerse actualizado sobre las últimas noticias y anuncios a medida que comienza la cuenta regresiva para la gran inauguración anticipada de NSF Arecibo C3 en noviembre.  Visite www.areciboc3.org para conocer oportunidades de involucrarse y ser parte de esta iniciativa transformadora.  the National Science Foundation will decommission and dismantle the giant dish at Arecibo Observatory at Arecibo The telescope is shown here with a gash caused by a cable slip in August 2020 the National Science Foundation reported that the 900-ton instrument platform at the focal point of Arecibo Observatory has collapsed “Our top priority is maintaining safety,” said the NSF in a tweet and the foundation will release more details when they are confirmed The large Cornell-designed telescopic “ear” at Arecibo which listened for the enlightening crackle of the cosmos for nearly six decades In the wake of two recent support-cable failures the National Science Foundation (NSF) will decommission and dismantle the giant dish at Arecibo Observatory – the world-class radio telescope in Puerto Rico that was conceived by Cornell faculty built with federal funding and then managed by Cornell for its first five decades has conducted research at the Arecibo Observatory and has served as its director “Arecibo has been an incredibly productive facility for nearly 60 years,” said Jonathan Lunine and chair of the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) “For the Cornell scientists and engineers who took a daring dream and realized it for the scientists who made new discoveries with this uniquely powerful radio telescope and planetary radar,” Lunine said “and for all the young people who were inspired to become scientists by the sight of this enormous telescope in the middle of the island of Puerto Rico a support cable detached and slashed the massive mesh dish which measures 1,000 feet (305 meters) in diameter which now manages the facility on behalf of the NSF sent engineers to evaluate fixing the famed telescope Engineers had formulated solutions and were poised to implement emergency structural stabilization to the cable system that holds the dish while awaiting delivery of replacement cables Due to the stress on the second broken cable – which was thought to still be structurally sound – scientists at the NSF and engineers concluded that the remaining cables were likely weaker than originally believed Conceived in the late 1950s by the late William E to study the Earth’s upper atmosphere and nearby space the telescope was built in a natural bowl in central Puerto Rico in the early 1960s. Meanwhile professor and chair of the Department of Astronomy created the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research to organize the observatory’s scientific investigations Wetherill Professor of Astronomy and the university’s assistant vice president for research from 1969–1971 helped to transform the observatory into the world’s most powerful radio telescope and a key tool for astronomy Like a gigantic ear attentive to the heavens the Arecibo telescope had been Earth’s largest single-aperture radio telescope galaxies and objects in the solar system and examine our planet’s ionosphere It’s so large that the height of the Empire State Building fits in its diameter; the Washington Monument would sit snug at the dish’s focal point The Arecibo listened day and night to the natural clatter throughout the universe. In 2012, the observatory captured one of the most fleeting, mysterious and rare deep-space events – a so-called “fast radio burst” that lasted a mere three one-thousandths of a second “It was a single pulse,” said James Cordes Cornell’s George Feldstein Professor of Astronomy (A&S) and a prolific “The nature of these bursts had been in doubt … and the discovery at Arecibo cements the case that they are astrophysical.” Arecibo found the first pulsars in a binary system – a duet of neutron stars – in 1974 It mapped out water ice deposits in craters at the poles of Mercury uncovered lake-like structures on the Saturnian moon Titan and measured the precise orbits of near-Earth asteroids.  The discovery of the two pulsars in a binary orbit resulted in the confirmation of Albert Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves This was the best evidence to their existence until a direct detection of gravitational waves was made by LIGO in 2015 “My first trip to Arecibo was in 1972 as a first-year graduate student at the University of California I’ve made about 150 trips to Puerto Rico and I’ve spent an accumulated total of three years there  “It was always a great thrill in the control room of the telescope,” Cordes said “seeing pulses from rotating neutron stars – pulsars – displayed on an oscilloscope in real time.” Forty-six years ago, Cornell astronomy professors Frank Drake and Carl Sagan famously sent a radio message via Arecibo to the heavens – featuring basic information about the human race – to potential extraterrestrials The purpose was to call attention to the tremendous power of the newly installed radar transmitter at the observatory “It was strictly a symbolic event, to show that we could do it,” said Donald Campbell now a professor emeritus of astronomy (A&S) who was a research associate at the observatory at the time Campbell went on to become director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center which managed the telescope until 2011 for the NSF Arecibo was also the premier solar system radar facility in the world and it was well funded by NASA to allow precise orbital motion studies of near-Earth asteroids “This is a big loss for tracking them,” he said shape and rotation of near-Earth asteroids and provide much more accurate predictions of their future orbits than can be obtained using optical telescopes alone.” Martha Haynes the Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy (A&S) “Surveys of atomic hydrogen using Arecibo,” she said “has been the cornerstone of my research career.” Haynes’ Arecibo work led to the discovery of the filamentary nature of the large-scale structure in the universe, which earned her the 1989 Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, an honor she shared with astronomy professor emeritus Riccardo Giovanelli Currently, Cordes is part of a project called NANOGrav (the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves) which uses pulsars as astrophysical clocks to detect gravitational waves from binary black holes “In 15 years of obtaining data on this project “We were on the verge of making our first detection Get Cornell news delivered right to your inbox the absurd and the little moments in life that are beyond us Arecibo will appeal to fans of fine, chiselled humor, those who enjoy one-man shows where you laugh as much as you think Between self-mockery and offbeat observations Louis Cattelat offers an original take on the world where the great human quest for contact - with aliens or with one's hairdresser - becomes a pretext for reflections as absurd as they are pertinent Our reviews of shows and plays to discover in ParisFancy going to see a play or show in Paris or the Ile-de-France region, but don't know which one to choose? Our reviews of current plays and shows are here to advise you! [Read more] Our must-see shows in ParisIn 2025, Paris offers a wide variety of magical shows for unforgettable evenings. Discover our favorites! [Read more] Refer your establishment, click herePromote your event, click here The National Science Foundation facility is closed while engineers review the damage and assess the extent of repairs that will be needed to bring the telescope back online One of the auxiliary cables that helps support a metal platform in place above the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico 10) causing a 100-foot-long gash on the telescope’s reflector dish Operations at the UCF-managed observatory are stopped until repairs can be made When the three-inch cable fell it also damaged about 6-8 panels in the Gregorian Dome and twisted the platform used to access the dome It is not yet clear what caused the cable to break “We have a team of experts assessing the situation,” says Francisco Cordova “Our focus is assuring the safety of our staff and restoring the facility to full operations as soon as possible so it can continue to assist scientists around the world.” UCF manages the NSF-facility under a cooperative agreement with Universidad Ana G which is home to one of the most powerful telescopes on the planet is used by scientists around the world to conduct research in the areas of atmospheric sciences Arecibo is also home to a team that runs the Planetary Radar Project supported by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program in NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office through a grant awarded to UCF The facility has endured many hurricanes, tropical storms and earthquakes since it was built 50 years ago. Repairs from Hurricane Maria in 2017 are ongoing. Through it all, the facility has continued to contribute to significant breakthroughs in space research in the area of gravitational waves Stories This week UMBC was named as one of four institutions chosen to work together on a National Science Foundation-funded project to establish a new science educational center at the Arecibo Observatory site in Puerto Rico NSF will contribute more than $5 million over five years to establish the multidisciplinary center called the Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education The center is expected to open in early 2024 and will include a research laboratory and a hands-on Other workshops will recruit mothers and daughters to learn coding together and will teach new skills to women and other participants who already code Several UMBC graduate and undergraduate students and staff members have been involved in developing and testing the workshop materials “My passion has always been to increase the number of Latinas in computing,” says Ordóñez was a member of the computer science department at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras “There are too few of us in the field—creating inclusive programs from Arecibo C3 will help us bridge that gap.” The other grant awardees are Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Arecibo C3 will offer a suite of activities including explorations of biodiversity and how to identify species using short segments of DNA The Arecibo C3 team will also advance research to explore how STEM teaching can be enhanced through the presentation of data in audio “The new educational center builds on the great scientific, educational, and cultural legacy of the Arecibo Observatory and is closely aligned with NSF’s goal to create STEM opportunities everywhere,” said James L. Moore III, NSF assistant director for STEM Education, in a press release “The center aims to create new opportunities for STEM education computer and natural sciences in Puerto Rico and beyond.” Ordóñez credits the talents of the whole Arecibo C3 team with turning what feels like a dream of hers into a reality “We recognize the responsibility of what we are doing and we are going to work very hard to create the environment of inclusive excellence in Arecibo that everyone deserves so that everyone sees they have a place in STEM,” she says For updates on the project, please visit the Arecibo C3 website Sign up for our weekly UMBC Top Stories email: Share a story idea and learn more about the news team After a world-famous radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico collapsed two years ago many scientists hoped that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) would eventually build a new one to replace it the agency has announced that it will establish an educational centre for science engineering and mathematics (STEM) at the site The revised plan might wind down or drastically alter the remaining research being done at Arecibo Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03293-4 Correction 17 October 2022: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the range of studies that the 12-metre radio antenna at the Arecibo Observatory currently performs A lighthouse galaxy shines unexpectedly through the fog of the cosmic dawn Light pollution threatens fleet of world-class telescopes in Atacama Desert Can Germany rein in its academic bullying problem Cuts to US science will take a generation to repair — leaders must speak up now Huge reproducibility project fails to validate dozens of biomedical studies POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW Post Summary of the role The Characterisation & Processing of Advanced Materials HT is an interdisciplinary research institute created and supported by the Italian government whose aim is to develop innovative strategies to pr.. UNIL is a leading international teaching and research institution with over 5,000 employees and 17,000 students split between its Dorigny campus Department of Energy and Environmental Materials and advance cancer research in a leading translational institute Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science local communities and the public within and outside of Puerto Rico.  Funded under the Arecibo Center for STEM Education and Research (ACSER) solicitation and future research capabilities and technology at the site."  Four institutions will work together to establish Arecibo C3 and will collaborate with Ciencia Puerto Rico and STEM Program Evaluation, Assessment, and Research families and the general public.     Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.  University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras.  Universidad del Sagrado Corazón.  University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  and ultimately the breadth of all areas of STEM education.    focusing on the people and the maximum expression of the human intellect that resides in the constantly evolving life of the entire community."  A highlight of the science center will be an Arecibo Observatory Legacy Exhibition.  These collaborative partnerships will form the cornerstones of Arecibo C3 and will further NSF's overall strategy to develop the diverse and globally engaged workforce necessary to ensure that the nation remains a global leader in science and engineering research and innovation.  For more information about NSF programs, visit nsf.gov. For updates on Arecibo C3, a new website is currently under development and will be accessible at www.areciboc3.org.  UPDATE: During ongoing aerial drone surveillance of the Arecibo Observatory’s 305-meter telescope engineers observed additional breakages on the exterior wires of the remaining cables attached to Tower 4 This is the same tower to which the failed auxiliary cable and the broken main cable were attached As engineers continue their work on a safety plan for the 305-meter telescope decommissioning process NSF will continue to assess the situation and use every available resource to determine a safe path forward Following a review of engineering assessments that found damage to the Arecibo Observatory cannot be stabilized without risk to construction workers and staff at the facility National Science Foundation will begin plans to decommission the 305-meter telescope which for 57 years has served as a world-class resource for radio astronomy The decision comes after NSF evaluated multiple assessments by independent engineering companies that found the telescope structure is in danger of a catastrophic failure and its cables may no longer be capable of carrying the loads they were designed to support several assessments stated that any attempts at repairs could put workers in potentially life-threatening danger Even in the event of repairs going forward engineers found that the structure would likely present long-term stability issues although unfortunate," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan the Arecibo Observatory has served as a beacon for breakthrough science and what a partnership with a community can look like we will be looking for ways to assist the scientific community and maintain that strong relationship with the people of Puerto Rico." Engineers have been examining the Arecibo Observatory 305-meter telescope since August NSF authorized the University of Central Florida to take all reasonable steps and use available funds to address the situation while ensuring safety remained the highest priority and the evaluation process was following its expected timeline the complexity of the design and the potential risk to workers The engineering teams had designed and were ready to implement emergency structural stabilization of the auxiliary cable system While the observatory was arranging for delivery of two replacement auxiliary cables Based on the stresses on the second broken cable -- which should have been well within its ability to function without breaking -- engineers concluded that the remaining cables are likely weaker than originally projected "Leadership at Arecibo Observatory and UCF did a commendable job addressing this situation acting quickly and pursuing every possible option to save this incredible instrument," said Ralph Gaume director of NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences our question was not if the observatory should be repaired but how a preponderance of data showed that we simply could not do this safely The scope of NSF's decommissioning plan would focus only on the 305-meter telescope and is intended to safely preserve other parts of the observatory that could be damaged or destroyed in the event of an unplanned The plan aims to retain as much as possible of the remaining infrastructure of Arecibo Observatory so that it remains available for future research and educational missions The decommissioning process involves developing a technical execution plan and ensuring compliance with a series of legal safety and cultural requirements over the coming weeks NSF has authorized a high-resolution photographic survey using drones and is considering options for forensic evaluation of the broken cable -- if such action could be done safely -- to see if any new evidence could inform the ongoing plans This work has already begun and will continue throughout the decommissioning planning Equipment and other materials will be temporarily moved to buildings outside the danger zone When all necessary preparations have been made the telescope would be subject to a controlled disassembly NSF would intend to restore operations at assets such as the Arecibo Observatory LIDAR facility -- a valuable geospace research tool -- as well as at the visitor center and offsite Culebra facility which analyzes cloud cover and precipitation data NSF would also seek to explore possibilities for expanding the educational capacities of the learning center Safety precautions due to the COVID-19 pandemic will remain in place as appropriate Some Arecibo operations involving the analysis and cataloging of archived data collected by the telescope would continue UCF secured enhanced cloud storage and analytics capabilities in 2019 through an agreement with Microsoft and the observatory is working to migrate on-site data to servers outside of the affected area Areas of the observatory that could be affected by an uncontrolled collapse have been evacuated since the November cable break and will remain closed to unauthorized personnel during the decommissioning NSF and UCF will work to minimize risk in the area in the event of an unexpected collapse thorough process with the intent of avoiding such an event NSF recognizes the cultural and economic significance of Arecibo Observatory to Puerto Rico and how the telescope serves as an inspiration for Puerto Ricans considering education and employment in STEM NSF's goal is to work with the Puerto Rican government and other stakeholders and partners to explore the possibility of applying resources from Arecibo Observatory for educational purposes Arecibo Observatory has helped transform our understanding of the ionosphere composition and other factors interact to shape this critical region where Earth’s atmosphere meets space,"  said Michael Wiltberger head of NSF's Geospace Section. "While I am disappointed by the loss of investigative capabilities I believe this process is a necessary step to preserve the research community's ability to use Arecibo Observatory's other assets and hopefully ensure that important work can continue at the facility." Arecibo Observatory’s telescope consists of a radio dish 1,000 feet (305 meters) wide in diameter with a 900-ton instrument platform hanging 450 feet above The platform is suspended by cables connected to three towers slipping from its socket in one of the towers and leaving a 100-foot gash in the dish below NSF authorized Arecibo Observatory to take all reasonable steps and use available funds to secure the analysis and equipment needed to address the situation Engineers were working to determine how to repair the damage and determine the integrity of the structure when a main cable connected to the same tower broke Nov The second broken cable was unexpected -- engineering assessments following the auxiliary cable failure indicated the structure was stable and the planning process to restore the telescope to operation was underway Engineers subsequently found this 3-inch main cable snapped at about 60% of what should have been its minimum breaking strength during a period of calm weather raising the possibility of other cables being weaker than expected Inspections of the other cables revealed new wire breaks on some of the main cables and evidence of significant slippage at several sockets holding the remaining auxiliary cables which were added during a refit in the 1990s that added weight to the instrument platform the engineering firm of record hired by UCF to assess the structure found that given the likelihood of another cable failing repair work on the telescope -- including mitigation measures to stabilize it for additional work -- would be unsafe Stress tests to capture a more accurate measure of the remaining cables' strength could collapse the structure The firm recommended a controlled demolition to eliminate the danger of an unexpected collapse "Although it saddens us to make this recommendation we believe the structure should be demolished in a controlled way as soon as pragmatically possible " said the recommendation for action letter submitted by Thornton Tomasetti "It is therefore our recommendation to expeditiously plan for decommissioning of the observatory and execute a controlled demolition of the telescope." UCF also hired two other engineering firms to provide assessments of the situation One recommended immediate stabilization action after reviewing Thornton Tomasetti's model concurred that there is no course of action that could safely verify the structure's stability and advised against allowing personnel on the telescope's platforms or towers “Critical work remains to be done in the area of atmospheric sciences radio astronomy and radar astronomy,” UCF President Alexander N “UCF stands ready to utilize its experience with the observatory to join other stakeholders in pursuing the kind of commitment and funding needed to continue and build on Arecibo’s contributions to science.” After receiving the contracted assessments NSF brought in an independent engineering firm and the Army Corps of Engineers to review the findings The firm NSF hired concurred with the recommendations of Thornton Tomasetti and expressed concern about significant danger from uncontrolled collapse The Army Corps of Engineers recommended gathering additional photographic evidence of the facility and a complete forensic evaluation of the broken cable Given the fact that any stabilization or repair scenario would require workers to be on or near the telescope structure the degree of uncertainty about the cables' strength and the extreme forces at work NSF accepted the recommendation to prepare for controlled decommissioning of the 305-meter telescope Engineering assessments from the companies contracted by UCF are available online: Thornton Tomasetti recommendation for course of action at Arecibo Observatory WSP recommendation for future efforts at Arecibo Observatory WJE memorandum on Arecibo Observatory stabilization efforts the Arecibo Observatory collapsed following its decommissioning by the National Science Foundation the previous month it was the largest radio telescope in the world But the Arecibo antenna will soon be taken apart and trucked away One of small number of cables (each as thick as your arm) holding the receiver platform high above the dish failed last August Engineers realized that the mechanical health of the telescope was far poorer than they had believed Arecibo was always the big guy on the team constructed of aluminum panels perforated like ceiling tile is hunkered down in a natural sinkhole in the karst of northwestern Puerto Rico Since early plans for the instrument foresaw study of the solar system The planets would then pass more or less overhead but the Cornell team designing the instrument figured that Hawaii was too far from Ithaca It’s said that the telescope’s principal architect chose its exact location by sliding a nickel around a topographic map of Puerto Rico until he found a natural depression in which the antenna would fit New Mexico’s Very Large Array has but one-fifth the collecting area The VLA would get lost in the vast aluminum expanse of Arecibo’s main reflector The telescope has some limitations: It can only be aimed over a 40 degree range of angles at any given time approximately one-third of the cosmos is accessible to Arecibo Its typical field of view is ten times narrower than the full moon it doesn’t have the resolution – the ability to see small detail – that antenna arrays can deliver Precise radio maps of the heavens are not its métier when your research is all about photons – about studying weak or distant emitters of radio waves – then Arecibo goes to the head of the class  It’s simply a bigger bucket for collecting radio waves coming to us from elsewhere in the universe I spent a lot of time at Arecibo studying galaxies that were many millions of light-years away The antenna is also frequently used for pulsar research and measurement of the emission from planets in our own solar system Even sky-savvy folk seem to forget that it was Arecibo that Polish astronomer Alex Wolszczsan used to discover the first planet around another star in 1992 There’s another thing that distinguishes Arecibo from its dishy peers: An ability to transmit Arecibo’s number one assignment was expected to be a routine aiming of its transmitter at the sky to measure the amount of energy reflected from the ionosphere Better understanding of the idiosyncrasies of this charged atmospheric layer was important for long-distance radio communication a matter of considerable interest to the military This capability led to the moniker given the telescope by the Puerto Rican locals: El Radar Arecibo’s monster 2 megawatt transmitter has been used for other projects including early mapping of the topography of cloud-covered Venus and more recent studies of asteroids But perhaps its most celebrated transmitting experiment took place in 1974 when Frank Drake – the observatory director at the time – celebrated an upgrade to the antenna by transmitting a 3 minute-long friendly message to the globular star cluster the most powerful message ever sent from Earth you can expect a reply in about 44,000 years Arecibo’s efforts to locate alien societies have largely been its listening experiments: SETI While there were some early SETI observations made on an ad hoc basis in 1992 the NASA SETI Program began a study of 1,000 star systems at Arecibo Some of these stars were several hundred light-years away so Arecibo’s unrivaled sensitivity was a major selling point After the cancellation of the NASA program scarcely a year later private- and university-funded projects kept Arecibo in the SETI game The Berkeley SETI group ran a piggyback observing program that took advantage of a second receiver on the antenna to observe random parts of the sky while the main receiver was in use by other astronomers The SETI Institute used Arecibo for three years beginning in 1998 as part of its Project Phoenix a scrutiny of about 800 nearby star systems For those astronomers and SETI researchers who have spent time at the Puerto Rican installation the loss of this telescope is akin to hearing that your high school has burned down Observing at Arecibo was much like going to summer camp while enjoying the conviviality of the friendly local telescope operators and staff as well as the kitchen’s first-rate chicken-and-rice dinners For two weeks you were on-site while the rest of the world with its incessant demands and petty annoyances Losing Arecibo is like losing a big brother something powerful and profoundly wonderful is gone Durante medio siglo fuel el radio telescopio más grande del mundo pero pronto la antena de Arecibo será desmantelada y retirada Un pequeño número de cables (cada uno tan grueso como su brazo) que sostienen la plataforma del receptor por arriba del disco Los ingenieros se dieron cuenta de que la salud mecánica del telescopio era peor de lo que esperaban que durante mucho tiempo financió el instrumento su reflector principal de 1,000 pies (poco más de 300 metros) de diámetro abarca un sumidero natural en el karst del noroeste de Puerto Rico debido a que los primeros planes para el instrumento preveían el estudio del Sistema Solar era deseable que estuviera cerca del ecuador Los planetas pasarían más o menos por arriba de éste La propiedad inmobiliaria más al sur de los EE pero el equipo de Cornell que diseñó el instrumento pensó que Hawái estaba demasiado lejos de Ithaca y optó por Puerto Rico Se dice que el arquitecto principal del telescopio eligió su ubicación exacta deslizando una moneda de cinco centavos alrededor de un mapa topográfico de Puerto Rico hasta que encontró una depresión natural en la que encajaría la antena el tamaño de Arecibo y la consiguiente sensibilidad no tuvieron rival El Conjunto Muy Grande (VLA por sus siglas en inglés) en Nuevo México tiene solo una quinta parte del área de recolección El VLA se perdería en la vasta extensión de aluminio del reflector principal de Arecibo El telescopio tiene algunas limitaciones: solo puede apuntarse en un rango de ángulos de 40 grados en un momento dado Pero la rotación de la Tierra significa que aproximadamente un tercio del cosmos es accesible a Arecibo Para la mayoría de los programas de observación Pero si bien puede ver gran parte del cielo Su campo de visión típico es diez veces más estrecho que la luna llena Al igual que otras antenas de un solo plato no tiene la resolución o la capacidad de ver pequeños detalles que pueden ofrecer los conjuntos de antenas La cartografía precisa en radio de los cielos no son su forte cuando tu investigación tiene que ver con los fotones -estudiar de emisores débiles o distantes de ondas de radio- entonces Arecibo va a la cabeza de la clase Es simplemente el cubo más grande para recolectar ondas de radio que nos llegan de otras partes del universo estudiando galaxias que estaban a muchos millones de años luz de distancia La antena también se utiliza con frecuencia para la investigación de púlsares y la medición de las emisiones de los planetas de nuestro propio sistema solar Incluso la gente conocedora del cielo parece olvidar que el astrónomo polaco Alex Wolszczsan utilizó el telescopio de Arecibo para descubrir el primer planeta alrededor de otra estrella en 1992 Hay otra cosa que distingue a Arecibo de sus pares populares: la capacidad de transmitir se esperaba que la tarea principal de Arecibo fuera el uso rutinario de su transmisor hacia el cielo para medir la cantidad de energía reflejada de la ionosfera Una mejor comprensión de las idiosincrasias de esta capa atmosférica cargada fue importante para la comunicación por radio a larga distancia un asunto de considerable interés para los militares Esta capacidad llevó al apodo que los lugareños le dieron al telescopio: El Radar el monstruoso transmisor de 2 megawatt de Arecibo ha sido usado para otros proyectos incluyendo la cartografía topográfica del nublado Venus Pero quizá su experimento de transmisión más celebrado tuvo lugar en 1974 quien era el director del observatorio en ese momento- celebró la actualización de la antena al transmitir un mensaje amigable de 3 minutos de duración el mensaje más potente que se ha enviado desde la Tierra podemos esperar una respuesta dentro de 44,000 años A close up of the damage from the Arecibo Observatory telescope collapse on Dec An archive image of Arecibo Observatory's massive radio dish shows the heavy science platform suspended above it two of the supporting towers and the complex cabling holding it up An image showing damage to Arecibo Telescope's massive dish after a cable slipped out of its socket in August 2020 Arecibo Observatory's radio telescope's science platform illuminated at night A view of the science platform from the center of the iconic radio dish at Arecibo Observatory "I personally think that this was the first cut; this was done in the wake of the collapse just to show that there are viable options of continuing the legacy of fantastic science at the telescope," Tracy Becker a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and co-author on a white paper describing the design "I don't think that this version has to necessarily be what a new "It could end up looking more like the original telescope or it could look completely different from anything that we've imagined so far The primary goal was to show that we could use that space and continue that legacy of really powerful science." Related: Losing Arecibo Observatory would create a hole that can't be filled, scientists say dubbed the Next Generation Arecibo Telescope is perhaps better approached as a statement than a blueprint scientists aren't even sure this particular design can be built But the project was meant to paint a picture of what the next 60 years of science at Arecibo could perhaps look like — if institutions are willing to show up for the facility "We had to think bold and we had to think big because you don't inspire the next generations and you don't serve the next generations if you just want to do what you were doing," Noemí Pinilla-Alonso deputy principal scientist at Arecibo Observatory "That was a result of someone thinking bold and big 60 years ago." Pinilla-Alonso who is also a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida is one of dozens of co-authors on the design concept The design came together within just two months of the collapse that's because the process was a salve for scientists with close ties to and strong feelings for the observatory "It was not so long that it took me to pass from the feeling of sadness we're making progress,'" Pinilla-Alonso said the scientists behind the new concept are trying to keep the momentum going in order to try to accelerate the rebuilding process Arecibo Observatory Director Francisco Cordova "We have hundreds of scientists right now that are scrambling to find another telescope that will be able to give them the data they need to continue their projects." But there's only so much more that scientists can do on their own before any institutions step up to fund work on the project held a virtual workshop throughout June to explore options for Arecibo Observatory writ large Officials have emphasized that Arecibo will continue to exist but the agency has not committed to rebuilding the telescope as it stood or to supporting a new project at similar scale The workshop didn't allocate any funding and wasn't meant to result in selected projects "There is no current plan to build a new radio telescope, although this is certainly an idea worthy of discussion," workshop leaders wrote in a document describing the process our main goal is to explore a broad range of options which should engage all segments of the community and may be complementary." (Right now, the NSF has plenty on its hands just to ensure safety at the site and clean up the debris, a process the agency in March estimated would require about $50 million.) the agency focused on broader consideration of the site's future "NSF is committed to participating in this future development but is not restricting the ideas to the construction of a new telescope," the document noted "That is certainly one long-term possibility and also near-term projects that could bridge the gap while a potential large project is being designed." The grand design isn't the only option the NSF will contemplate when it decides what to do with the telescope's legacy The observatory overall can resume some science activities fairly quickly. There's a host of other equipment at the site that is still working and observatory leadership wants to repair at least some of the antennas of one experiment that sat at the center of the dish to use elsewhere and the panels aren't particularly difficult or expensive to replace And the bottom portion of all three towers that held the suspended cables remain sturdy That combination could be the basis for rebuilding the lost telescope essentially as it was but using newer technology and more advanced materials "There are many directions to go in," Joanna Rankin a radio astronomer at the University of Vermont who is not a co-author on the white paper but did formally endorse it "Of course it's exciting to choose the most ambitious and technologically exciting one Related: Puerto Rican scientists mourn loss of Arecibo Observatory's iconic telescope The daring Next Generation Arecibo Telescope design traces its roots to Zoom meetings that Rankin who first arrived at the facility five decades ago and has used it ever since when the old telescope's precarity became clear Quickly dubbed "vigils,"  the gatherings started with a dozen attendees but ballooned to encompass a couple hundred scientists there was a meeting or two that was kind of a ghoulish dissecting how the telescope collapsed and the resulting damage as scientists turned their focus to the future the thing which came to our mind is we should have a plan to rebuild it," Anish Roshi a radio astronomer at Arecibo Observatory and the lead author of the white paper "That's when all the discussions and meetings with the community — everything became very active discussing what to replace this telescope with and how to rebuild this telescope." The result of that work is a 70-page paper outlining the case for an innovative new Arecibo Telescope to build on the scientific legacy of the fallen instrument bringing together the community who used Arecibo meant reaching across three very different fields of science "Those three scientific specialties evolved a kind of symbiosis at Arecibo which was completely unique to Arecibo," Rankin said Scientists calling for rebuilding say that union of three separate fields ought to be honored into the facility's future "We wanted to keep being a multidisciplinary facility," Pinilla-Alonso said "We didn't want to prioritize one against the other so we had to think of something that could serve the three communities." In addition to keeping the union of disparate disciplines the process was based on the premise that a replacement facility should retain the lost telescope's site tucked away in Puerto Rico's verdant interior the site was dictated by the military looking to put the instrument somewhere on U.S Astronomers also cited the value of retaining a host of infrastructure that remains despite the collapse like the sinkhole the telescope nestled inside and the staff and community that support the observatory "No instrument is really entirely the hardware The hardware is only the beginning of the story," Rankin said Plus, there's a precious resource for which radio astronomers will trek deep into deserts — shelter from the constant chatter of technology operating in the same radio wavelengths that scientists want to observe and astronomers can't simply pack up that quiet and carry it with them Regulations around Arecibo protect the facility from radio interference "It would be incredibly horrid not to use the site in some creative manner The first step in designing a new telescope was identifying what a next-generation facility in each field would be able to do 'Let's design something different,'" Pinilla-Alonso said "We started discussing the science and what was the role which Arecibo wanted to have for the future." That's not how scientists are used to coming up with observing programs because you are used to making the best of one thing that is already there," she said But not so for pulling together the heart of the Next Generation Arecibo Telescope white paper: new science goals for the site which form a wishlist of sorts for what experts in each field want next Some of the scientific priorities the team identified overlap across the three communities everyone wants to see more of the sky and in more detail a Puerto Rican planetary astrobiologist who regularly used Arecibo to observe and who was involved in the science conversations about a new telescope Related: Losing Arecibo's giant dish leaves humans more vulnerable to space rocks, scientists say and so if things weren't perfect it still worked," Mike Nolan a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona that's less true." But the white paper scientists say the design they sketched out would be able to observe six times as many asteroids Meanwhile, for radio astronomers, a clear priority was to be able to point the instrument to the center of our galaxy which requires the flexibility to point a full 48 degrees away from the sky's zenith (Your clenched fist held at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of sky.) the specifications that the team worked toward meant that a few new types of science may be possible at the sort of facility they outline in addition to the work that the facility has done for decades One of those additional fields is understanding space weather a host of assorted influences the sun has on the solar system that can endanger astronauts and disrupt satellites in orbit and power systems on the ground And it turns out that the proposed capabilities of the new design would allow scientists to better monitor space weather including studying the solar wind and coronal mass ejections In addition, the design concept's radar system would be so much more powerful than the lost system that it could observe defunct satellites and other space debris in addition to its work on space rocks. For space junk in geosynchronous orbit the new design could see pieces about 3 feet (1 meter) across; the radar would also be able to monitor large debris out as far as the moon scientists set about designing one possible telescope to fulfill the Arecibo community's goals The result is nothing like the lost instrument the new design would fill the old telescope's massive bowl-shaped sinkhole with a closely packed hive of smaller dishes perched on perhaps seven massive tilting plates a "dish of dishes," as Pinilla-Alonso described it The precise statistics of those dishes is a matter of tradeoffs: more smaller dishes or fewer larger dishes "I remember when I got the first draft of the paper with all the engineering ideas all formalized that's a big change." But it's a big change that would address many longstanding issues with the previous telescope including the heavy platform that was ultimately the telescope's downfall The scientists behind the new design concept considered both a massive dish in a fixed position, like the lost telescope, and a scattering of many individual dishes across a landscape, like the Very Large Array in New Mexico they determined that what matched the science needs best was a sort of blend of those two models: many small dishes crammed together and able to move in tandem There's just one little problem: The scientists aren't sure yet whether such a structure can actually be built But the outlined idea gives engineers something to work with a place to start digging into the tradeoffs involved in building an ambitious new telescope The scientists behind the concept hope that process can begin later this year "It's a conceptual design," Rankin emphasized "No one has passed it by all the droves of engineers that need to check it and think about it to decide whether it can actually be built or would work if it was built." Engineering questions aren't the only hurdles to tackle to make a new Arecibo a reality is finding the money to build anything at the scale of the original telescope The authors of the white paper suggest that a budget on the scale of $454 million could cover construction as the NSF has decreased its funding for the observatory over the past two decades to address larger agency budget crunches the NSF budget was supposed to double and didn't," Rankin said no immediate huge splash from the second upgrading and so Arecibo became kind of an easy target." It's not like other big budget increases have come through since then. And although Arecibo's situation echoes the abrupt collapse in 1988 of the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia that was rebuilt by 2000 Rankin doesn't expect Arecibo to be as lucky Strong advocacy in Congress from West Virginia's two senators was crucial in getting that telescope rebuilt but Arecibo has no such support: As a territory Puerto Rico doesn't have any representation in Congress Related: Arecibo isn't the first radio telescope to unexpectedly fail. Here's what we can learn from Green Bank's collapse. "Arecibo was always a cheap target because Puerto Rico has no senators," Rankin said "If that had happened to any of the other NSF facilities the senators would have been there with boots on but there was none of that kind of protection for Puerto Rico." Puerto Rico has no senators and only a resident commissioner a member of the House of Representatives who can't join full floor votes "The collapse was met with great sadness to say the least," Jenniffer González-Colón I have been in contact with the different stakeholders to discuss possible ways to move forward including potential reconstruction of the telescope so that we can once more fully partake of all of the great features hosted by AO [Arecibo Observatory] and their team of experts and maintain Puerto Rico’s legacy and contributions to STEM [science engineering and mathematics] fields.”  Although the telescope was the scientific pride of the island the territory's government surely can't fund a replacement who has been involved in discussions with the government "They're eager to provide funding for designing since the original telescope was built exclusively with money from the mainland Serendipitous timing issues could also shape Arecibo's fate. The telescope collapsed midway between President Donald Trump losing his re-election bid and President Joe Biden taking office The latter is surely more open to both science and Puerto Rico than his predecessor just because of the national political situation." Meanwhile, scientists have their own politics and schedules. Both NASA and the NSF rely on massive documents dubbed decadal surveys to guide their funding decisions large teams of scientists under the auspices of the prestigious National Academies of Sciences prioritize space-science projects on a 10-year time frame But the decadal survey that would best match a large ground-based radio facility is the astrophysics version which is currently undergoing peer review before publication Scientists doubt that document can support a rebuilding effort at Arecibo because the telescope collapsed after the committee's deadline for community input "Nobody expected that big money might be needed for a rebuilding," Rankin said "So Arecibo isn't in line to ask for big money for rebuilding." If the observatory cuts the line it risks upsetting other scientists contending for the same money A separate decadal survey for planetary science is earlier in the process and still receiving public comments and the planetary radar swath of Arecibo's work would be relevant to it although that document traditionally focuses on NASA facilities in space Cordova said he's confident that funding for design work and a new instrument will come through eventually although it may not be as soon as scientists would like "I'm optimistic — I think when you have the right capabilities in an instrument and the right science and operational mission objectives it's a lot easier to find funding for something," he said but that will evolve through the design process the engineering studies; all of this will evolve," he said But he has plenty of company in hoping that one day Arecibo will rise again with a steady eye on our atmosphere "It's a situation that's pregnant with possibility and humanity doesn't take advantage of all wonderful situations," Rankin said Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook with previous writing published in outlets including Newsweek and Audubon Meghan earned an MA in science journalism from New York University and a BA in classics from Georgetown University and in her free time she enjoys reading and visiting museums Hubble spies a skewed spiral galaxy | Space photo of the day for May 5 James Webb Space Telescope captures thousands of galaxies in a cosmic 'feast' (image) NASA's Artemis 2 moon rocket gets 2nd stage even as Trump tries to scrap Space Launch System (photos) Home / News / CSHL Stories and Media The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and three partnered higher education institutions over $5 million to establish a new science and mathematics (STEM) center at the site of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico The Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education and Community Engagement (Arecibo C3) will focus on the three Cs of ciencia (science) with a strong emphasis on inclusion and diversity the Center aims to create opportunities for women and girls and other groups historically underrepresented in STEM arranging local conferences that leverage the site’s prime location and lodgings Jason Williams assistant director for diversity and research readiness at the DNALC will serve as a project leader for Arecibo C3 the Center’s executive director from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón “We see Arecibo C3 becoming a hub for scientific outreach and exchange not just across the island but internationally,” Williams says “We’re focused on building an innovative science education platform that empowers people of all abilities to participate.” The collaborating institutions each bring their own teaching specialty to the center “The new educational center builds on the great scientific and cultural legacy of the Arecibo Observatory and is closely aligned with NSF’s goal to create STEM opportunities everywhere,” adds James L “The center aims to create new opportunities for STEM education and researchers in various STEM disciplines ranging from astronomy and radio science to biological and natural sciences in Puerto Rico and beyond.” Arecibo C3 is expected to open in 2024. For more information, visit the newly launched Arecibo C3 website Written by: Luis Sandoval, Communications Specialist | sandova@cshl.edu | 516-367-6826   Newsletter Signup   Donate Now   Newsletter Sitemap | Privacy Policy | Web Accessibility The screening will be the Florida premiere of the film that tells the story of the rise the fall and the future of what was once one of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes will have its Florida premiere at UCF Celebrates the Arts on April 14 at 7 p.m Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in the Alexis and Jim Pugh Theater The film has only played in select locations and the UCF screening will give audience members a sneak preview of the movie before its worldwide release The event will also feature a Q&A session with the movie’s director Attendance is free, and registration is now open Early registration is encouraged to ensure seat availability the fall and the future of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico the Arecibo Observatory’s 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope was one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world and it became pop-culture icon thanks to its appearances in the movies Goldeneye and Contact Scientists are still analyzing its treasure trove of backlog data the movie is personal not only because he grew up in Puerto Rico but also because of his family’s connection to the observatory schools have the tradition to take the kids in science class on a school trip to the Arecibo Observatory to learn astronomy and explore,” Hernandez Sepulveda says but for me there is an even bigger sentimental family approach My grandfather worked mixing cement in the construction of the Arecibo Observatory 57 years ago It was very important to tell the complete story of this amazing instrument and its legacy from the workers on the island of Puerto Rico to the scientists all around the world who did amazing discoveries on this iconic facility.” the documentary is important because it helps conveys Arecibo Observatory’s legacy to a larger audience “Arecibo has always been about dreaming and dreaming big,” she says. “We will continue to do so and are hoping to see a well-established and bright STEM Education Center at Arecibo that will bring new and innovative opportunities for the local and international community the scientific and research component can be integrated for the benefit of Puerto Rico and for the benefit of this and future generations to come.” To learn more about UCF Celebrates the Arts, please visit arts.ucf.edu/celebrates With innovative research in physics and planetary science UCF professors are developing the science and tech to get us back to the moon Every print subscription comes with full digital access The world-famous Arecibo telescope observed planets around our sun and other stars and uncovered sources of mysterious flashes of light By Maria Temming The sun has set on the iconic Arecibo telescope this behemoth radio telescope in Puerto Rico has observed everything from space rocks whizzing past Earth to mysterious blasts of radio waves from distant galaxies the 900-metric-ton platform of scientific instruments above the dish came crashing down demolishing the telescope and spelling the end of Arecibo’s observing days Arecibo has made too many discoveries to include in a Top 10 list, so some of its greatest hits didn’t make the cut — like a strange class of stars that appear to turn on and off (SN: 1/6/17) and ingredients for life in a distant galaxy But in honor of Arecibo’s 57-year tenure as one of the world’s premier observatories here are 10 of the telescope’s coolest accomplishments presented in roughly reverse order of coolness stellar corpses that sweep beams of radio waves around in space like celestial lighthouses (SN: 1/3/20) In 1982, Arecibo clocked a pulsar, dubbed PSR 1937+21, flashing every 1.6 milliseconds unseating the Crab Nebula neutron star as the fastest known pulsar (SN: 12/4/82) That find was puzzling at first because PSR 1937+21 is older than the Crab Nebula pulsar and pulsars were thought to rotate more slowly with age Then, astronomers realized that old pulsars can “spin-up” by siphoning mass from a companion star, and flash every one to 10 milliseconds. The NANOGrav project now uses such rapid-fire radio beacons as extremely precise cosmic clocks to search for the ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves (SN: 2/11/16) In 1965, Arecibo radar measurements revealed that Mercury spins on its axis once every 59 days That observation cleared up a long-standing mystery about the planet’s temperature If Mercury had turned on its axis once every 88 days then the same side of the planet would always face the sun That’s because it also takes 88 days for the planet to complete one orbit around the sun that side would be much hotter than the planet’s dark side The 59-day rotation better matched the observation that Mercury’s temperature is fairly even across its surface Other odd finds have included a space rock whose shadows made it look to Arecibo like a skull, and an asteroid with the improbable shape of a dog bone (SN: 7/24/01) Understanding the characteristics and motion of near-Earth asteroids helps determine which ones might pose a danger to Earth — and how they could be safely deflected The Arecibo Observatory broadcast the first radio message intended for an alien audience in November 1974 (SN: 11/23/74) That famous message was the most powerful signal ever sent from Earth meant in part to demonstrate the capabilities of the observatory’s new high-power radio transmitter beamed toward a cluster of about 300,000 stars roughly 25,000 light-years away That string of binary code detailed the chemical formulas for components of DNA a schematic of the solar system and other scientific data.  The first radio message meant for an alien audience (illustrated at left) was beamed into space in binary code by Arecibo in 1974 The message encoded information about DNA’s ingredients (green) and its double-helix shape (blue) a schematic of the solar system (yellow) and other data about life on Earth This confirmed the decade-long suspicion that FRBs come from beyond the Milky Way Gravitational waves were first directly detected in 2015 (SN: 2/11/16), but astronomers saw the first indirect evidence of ripples in spacetime decades ago. That evidence came from the first pulsar found orbiting another star first sighted by Arecibo in 1974 (SN: 10/19/74) Thousands of exoplanets have since been discovered orbiting other stars, including sunlike stars (SN: 10/8/19). Recent exoplanet surveys, however, suggest that pulsar-orbiting planets are rare (SN: 9/3/15) Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org | Reprints FAQ Previously the staff writer for physical sciences at Science News Maria Temming is the assistant managing editor at Science News Explores She has bachelor's degrees in physics and English A commemorative postage stamp printed in Russia shows the Venera 8 spacecraft including an illustration in the background of the descent probe parachuting to the planet’s surface A twin probe that has been stuck in Earth’s orbit for more than 50 years is due to fall to Earth in mid-May A giant interstellar cloud dubbed Eos (illustrated green) lurks just 300 light-years from our solar system Its chemical composition kept it hiding in plain sight until now The Hubble Space Telescope was placed in low Earth orbit in 1990 by astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery High-resolution images from the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope have helped pinpoint a potential “dark galaxy” in the Milky Way’s neighborhood Some astronomers think the distant planet K2 18b (illustrated) may be an ocean world capable of hosting life NASA’s Curiosity rover drilled into different rocks along an 89-meter stretch of terrain on its route up a mountain in an ancient lakebed Samples from the rocks had carbon-bearing minerals that hint at a long lost carbon cycle and life-friendly climate Thousands of light-years beyond the eight stars that make up the teapot of the constellation Sagittarius lurks the first lone black hole ever detected just right of the top of the teapot’s spout Sagittarius appears in the southern sky during summer and early fall These yellow crystals on Mars were exposed after the Curiosity rover drove over a rock in May 2024 The crystals are made of pure elemental sulfur something that has never been seen on the Red Planet before The odd rock is one of a handful discovered on Mars in just the past year Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them It is published by the Society for Science a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483) enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.