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
Goddamn, reminded of the Decemberist who said Tsarist Russia was so decript it couldn't even hang a man correctly, after he survived his execution when the rope snapped. Like America can even die gracefully, they didn't even do enough inspections to shut it down a year early and take the time to dismantle the receiver properly, maybe leave the dish as a monument to America's past scientific glory. The structural sagging, fraying cables and rust penetration would have been blindingly obvious for years, to the point where you could estimate when the structure would finally fall apart, like this wasn't (or shouldn't have been) a suprise.
Instead they just let it collapse and create a ghoulish symbol of America's own decay.