Now it’s 1981 and the Arecibo telescope produces the first radar maps of Venus 1992, and the instrument finds ice at the poles of Mercury 5. The transmission is as much a symbol of human achievement as it is a long-distance message for an alien answering machine 5. The message is directed towards the M13 globular star cluster, and it’s the first intentional broadcast from Earth explicitly for extraterrestrials. 1974 is also the year that SETI, the “Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence” organization, uses Arecibo to beam into space a three-minute message of encoded visuals: images of things like DNA base pairs, atomic numbers of Earth’s most common elements, the basic human physical form, and the shape of the Arecibo telescope itself. Measurements from this finding support Einstein’s Relativity Theory and win Hulse and Taylor a Nobel Prize 5. By 1974 the telescope has facilitated the discovery of the first binary pulsar 5, a radio-signal-producing star in spiraling orbit of another star 6. The Arecibo telescope rises to this enthusiasm with increasingly groundbreaking achievements. Man walks on the moon in 1969, and all eyes are on the sky now: the space race is officially on, rocketing public and scientific interest to unprecedented heights. It’s 1967 when the instrument makes its first major discovery: Mercury’s planetary rotation takes 59 days, not 88 as was previously thought 4,5. This photograph was taken prior to the recent damage, as is clear from the intact condition of the 900-ton observational platform suspended above the instrument. The massive Arecibo radio telescope, nestled in a limestone valley in the mountainous forests of Puerto Rico. A 900-ton observational platform is suspended above the telescope, and an observatory is built around it.įigure 1. ![]() The Arecibo radio telescope dish is 1,000 feet across, 167 feet deep, and stretches over 20 acres 1 – the area of 15 football fields. To gather data across such vast distances – distances unmoored from any arbitrary human sense of scale – it’s fitting that the instrument, too, be of an otherworldly magnitude. ![]() Despite this pragmatic beginning, the telescope soon establishes itself as the pinnacle of astronomical research. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico is initially built to study the ionosphere, the atmospheric region where northern lights dance, to help bolster US military missile defenses. ![]() By the end of 1963 3, the limestone valley holds a feat of technological and engineering prowess powerful enough to send broadcasts thousands of light-years into space, monitor asteroids and planets, and collect depths and volumes of data faster and more precisely than ever before 2,4. It’s 1960, and under the supervision of the US military 2 and Cornell professor William Gordon, 1,3 a construction project is under way. Picture a rocky valley in the middle of a vast, dense forest, rich in limestone and of concave geography 1. ![]() Isaac Newton famously wrote that “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” For 57 years, humanity stood on the metaphorical shoulders of the Arecibo telescope and uncovered far-reaching, incredible insights about our universe.
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