Arecibo Observatory

To say the “museum” and the little movie they run are little bit of an anti-climax would be an understatement, but seeing the dish is incredible. The drive out there is scenic too as it’s out in the middle of some very hilly jungle. Driving the backroads of Puerto Rico is fun because it seems every road has a route number, with all the routes/intersections clearly labeled, which makes it easy enough to follow a road maps.

The museum isn’t so great, lots of rudimentary science stuff but the second floor does an ok job of explaining what Arecibo does. The massiveness of the dish speaks for itself.

Seriously. In the movie Contact, where she’s at the observatory. The love scene with Matthew McConnehey, that bed. Of course, Jodie was nowhere to be found. They added the headboard for the movie, too.

But I can honestly say that I’ve slept in Jodie Foster’s bed.

I’ve also been under the dish (a scene well described in Where Is Joe Merchant? A Novel Tale) and up to the platform above the dish (I was guilty of joining a gang of hoodlum scientists who flew paper airplanes for about an hour one muggy dawn).

AO was originally built as a radar – Bill Gordon championed it – to study the ionosphere.

ARECIBOPROVIDEDTHEFOLLOWINGSCIENCE!

The first planets outside the solar system were discovered around Pulsar B1257+12, a rapidly rotating pulsar with three Earth-like planets in orbit. ( early 1990s )

One of its first accomplishments: Establishing the rotating rate of Mercury, which turned out to be 59 days rather than the previously estimated 88 days ( 1965 ).

Detailed maps of the distribution of galaxies in the universe ( late 1980s ).

The first pulsar in a binary system was discovered ( 1974 ), leading to important confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and a Nobel Prize for astronomers Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor ( 1993 ).

Investigations of ice craters at the polar regions of the planet Mercury with the radar system ( 1990s ) and similar investigation of the lunar poles for evidence of ice ( 1997 ).

Provided much of our pre-Magellan mission knowledge of the surface of Venus via 1.5 km resolution imagery of the surface through the planet’s cloud cover using the radar system.

The observatory has made major contributions to our understanding of the chemistry and dynamics of the Earth’s upper atmosphere and ionosphere.

Discovery of two classes of pulsars: millisecond pulsars, which rotate several hundred times per second, and slower-rotating pulsars, which rotate about once per second. The slow-rotating pulsars speed through space, while millisecond pulsars move slowly through space.

Arecibo Observatory is uniquely suited to search for signals from extraterrestrial life, by focusing on thousands of star systems in the 1,000MHz to 3,000 MHz range. No such signals have been found.

Arecibo Observatory has provided a unique setting for Hollywood filmmakers. The observatory was the setting for the climatic scenes in the James Bond movie Goldeneye, and a good portion of the movie Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan and starring Jodie Foster, takes place at Arecibo. Another science fiction movie called Survivor was filmed on observatory grounds.

The home of SETI. And it’s a huge device the world uses to study the Ionosphere.

Long windy road on the way from the ocean to the dish is great.

Perhaps everyone else has said it, but Jody Foster shot the Carl Sagan film CONTACT at this site. Perhaps that movie was a bit of a leap, but one of the main uses for this dish is listening to space for signals from intelligent things out there in space, or wherever the hell they are, what ever they may be.

mikeacrossamerica.com