The enormous radio dish, which will not be rebuilt, spent nearly six decades scouring the sky for radio signals while nestled in the foothills of Puerto Rico.
into a yawning, forest-fringed concrete bowl once featured in a James Bond movie. But it took no fevered gunfire between Pierce Brosnan and Sean Bean to bring down what had once been the world’s largest single-dish radio observatory. Instead, the 1,000-foot-wide dish of the Arecibo Telescope owed its sad demise to the steady and inexorable creep of old age.
But Arecibo’s legacy in radio and radar astronomy and atmospheric physics, as well as its searches for extraterrestrial intelligence and harmful near-Earth objects, had darker origins.In the 1950s, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union chilled into the Cold War. As both superpowers built arsenals of city-flattening ballistic missiles, the Department of Defense sought new ways to intercept incoming Soviet warheads should they near American shores.
In 1958, Cornell University proposed an ambitious radio observatory to ARPA, framing it as a dual-use facility for radio astronomy and ionospheric physics. Early plans envisaged a fixed parabolic reflector , overhung by a tower housing the antenna ‘feed’ at the central focus of the huge dish below. Rather than a tower, however, designers ultimately settled on a suspended feed to both limit functional difficulties and save millions of dollars in costs.
With this transition from military to civilian hands came a name change to the National Astronomy and Ionospheric Center . Sixteen directors — hailing from the United States to Australia to Norway to Uruguay to Italy to Puerto Rico itself — turned Arecibo from a military-led Cold War asset into a multi-disciplinary research facility whose name now remains synonymous with exploration.
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