Arecibo Observatory Shuts Down Its Science

After weathering hurricanes, earthquakes, budget cuts and a pandemic-induced shutdown, the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico closed its doors on 14 August. After its main instrument collapsed two years ago, the site was supposed to shift from carrying out astronomy and other research to being a science education centre. But concrete plans for that have yet to materialize — and funding for current operations has run out.

The observatory’s main attraction — a 305-meter-wide dish that was responsible for, among other things, studying near-Earth asteroids, discovering exoplanets and observing gravitational waves — was destroyed in 2020 when some support cables snapped following years of delayed maintenance.

“The Arecibo Observatory was a great research site, but it also had many educational programs already, without being called a centre for education and research,” says Héctor Arce, an astronomer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. But without knowing who will manage the site, researchers are shutting down the telescope for now, unsure whether there will be funding for or interest in resuming its operation in future. “I feel like we’ve had a double loss in terms of telescopes. We lost the 305-meter telescope in December 2020, and now in August, we will lose the last radio telescope there,” Méndez adds.

Twenty or 30 years ago, Córdova Figueroa says, “we didn’t have the infrastructure to lead these types of projects”. Over the past few decades, Puerto Rico has established more research institutes, he adds. And since 1997, the percentage of the Puerto Rican workforce with a PhD has increased more than fourfold.One hope for bringing research back to the site is that Arecibo might host some of the dishes that are being planned as part of the Next Generation Very Large Array.

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