These efforts are part of the NSF’s ongoing efforts at the Arecibo Observatory to clean up debris from the 305-meter telescope’s 900-ton instrument platform and reopen remaining infrastructure. Researchers responded quickly to safely move a rich legacy of data after the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in December 2020. Preserving these data and making them available for further study will allow Arecibo’s legacy to have an ongoing impact on my field,” said Jaffe, who is an astronomer. “Arecibo made important contributions across many fields - studies of planets, setting the scale for the expansion of the universe, understanding the clouds from which stars form, to name a few. “I am thrilled that UT Austin will become the home of the data repository for one of the most important telescopes of the past half-century,” said Dan Jaffe, interim executive vice president and provost of The University of Texas at Austin. Plans include expanding access to more than 50 years of astronomy data from the Arecibo Observatory, which until 2016 had been the world’s largest radio telescope. Together, they’re moving the Arecibo radio telescope data to TACC’s Ranch, a long-term data mass storage system. Within weeks of Arecibo’s collapse, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) of UT Austin entered into a partnership with the University of Central Florida, the Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC), the Arecibo Observatory, the Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence Pilot (CICoE Pilot), and Globus at the University of Chicago. All in all, about three petabytes, or 3,000 terabytes, of telescope data needed to be rescued from the island before any other disaster might strike. It stored the “golden copy” of data - the original tapes, hard drives and disk drives of sky scans since the 1960s. Luckily, the data center for the Arecibo telescope was spared any long-term damage from the collapse. (Credit: TACC, CI CoE Pilot, Arecibo Observatory, EPOC) (Clockwise, upper left to right) Nathaniel Mendoza (TACC), Ewa Deelman (CI CoE Pilot), Julio Alvarado (Arecibo Observatory), Hans Addleman (EPOC), Jason Zurawski (EPOC). A few members of the team that came together to move Arecibo’s data. The 900-ton spidery-looking instrument platform snapped its gossamer-like suspension cables, which sent it crashing through the radio dish below and into the Puerto Rican countryside, destroying the giant telescope.Īstronomers worldwide keenly felt the loss of one of the world’s premier telescopes whose past achievements include discovery of the first planet found outside of our solar system and the first-ever binary pulsar, a find that tested Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and earned its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 1993. Millions of people have seen footage of the collapse in December 2020 of the famed Arecibo radio telescope. Now, thanks to a data rescue plan led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin, Arecibo’s observations will be preserved for generations of future astronomers. AUSTIN, Texas - When Puerto Rico’s famed Arecibo telescope collapsed in 2020, astronomers lost access to one of the world’s most treasured pieces of equipment – but also, potentially, decades of priceless data holding still undiscovered secrets about the universe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |