they're aiming to bring 2kg back, the Soviet trip in 1976 brought 170g back
But John Mathews, an emeritus professor at the Pennsylvania State University who visited and used Arecibo regularly from 1969 through 2019, says that “deferred maintenance has been a problem for decades, and it’s only gotten worse.” He points to visible corrosion of dish components and sagging smaller cables. Those are external features, he admits, “but many of us suspected that the structure was compromised.” He adds that “the ship was sinking, and the people who could get jobs elsewhere wisely did so” after the transition to the current UCF-led management team in 2018.
In conversations with Physics Today, many Arecibo users and employees suggested that morale among employees was as frayed as the cables that broke, and some requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “The family atmosphere is totally gone,” says one. The people working there have different benefits, depending on which of three entities in the management consortium employs them. Some people took pay cuts, he says, and some do not have retirement packages.
sclerotic fucking state won't even shell out a few more million dollars a year to properly maintain an iconic, world-class scientific instrument
It's definitely making me doom a bit.
I spent a decade of my life doing scientific research, and it was great and fulfilling. But this kind of thing happens all the time, and it's so demoralizing. I'm not even talking about the 70s when there was enough change in the national lab couch cushions to build particle colliders in the parking lots. But knowing that amazing scientific devices with years of development put into them, and potentially decades of good research ahead of them, instead get left to decay and rot.
I got out to write code, which sucks, but at least it pays well.
Also, for reference, the Arecibo budget before austerity cuts doomed it was $12 million a year. A single F-35A costs between $78 million and $133 million. Enough to run the thing for 5 or 10 years. Fuck!
Coincidentally, F-35As also frequently fall out to the ground as a heap of ruined and twisted metal, a metaphor for the dying empire that built it.
:rat-salute:
it's gross, tenths of a penny on the military dollar could have saved this thing (among many others) and they wouldn't spare it, even for the sake of national cachet
This awful country will truly sacrifice anything at the altar of military spending.