A Preliminary Plan to Quickly Restore Utility to the Arecibo 305m Telescope

Abstract

Since the fall of the Arecibo 305[Formula: see text]m telescope platform on 2020 December 1, there has been much discussion of building a new Arecibo telescope or rebuilding the facility that was destroyed. In the collapse, the top of the three platform support towers was sheared off, and the feed arm fell free from the swinging platform and destroyed 25% of the dish. Fortunately, the Control Building, the home of the computers, spectrometers, masers, atomic clocks, 430[Formula: see text]MHz Klystrons, etc., was spared. By replacing the main dish support cables and resurfacing with coarse mesh, the main dish can be repaired as a reflector [Formula: see text] operation. By replacing the damaged aluminum panels to make the dish whole again, RF operations at up to 500[Formula: see text]MHz can be resumed. In this paper, we outline the steps that can be taken to restore High Frequency (HF, 3–30[Formula: see text]MHz) ionospheric heating, 430[Formula: see text]MHz ionospheric incoherent scattering radar, passive radio observations of satellite arcing and pulsars, and to extend the field of regard to 47∘ from the zenith. This would restore and improve much of the utility of the Arecibo dish. Part of this plan involves supporting, positioning and pointing novel point feeds from lightweight football-camera-like cables, strung from the rebuilt tower tops. It is believed that the dish may thus become broadly useful long before replacement facilities can be engineered and constructed.