The Governor of Puerto Rico supports the reconstruction of the recently collapsed Arecibo radio telescope. To this end, she offers a small envelope. However, a final decision on whether and how to rebuild this giant telescope could take years and cost far more.
Could the famous Arecibo radio telescope, images of the destruction of which circled the world in early December, be rebuilt? In any case, this is the wish of the governor of Puerto Rico, Wanda Vázquez Garced. She signed an ordinance on December 28 , just before the end of his mandate (closed on January 1), aiming to serve this purpose. The new structure would have a larger effective aperture and wider field of view than the previous one, which was already aging.
To this end, the order states that the Puerto Rican government could allocate eight million dollars . This envelope would make it possible to clean the site and start any reconstruction work. In a separate statement, Vázquez Garced points out that this funding comes from budget surpluses from previous years.
The financial effort made by the island of Puerto Rico would also be supported by other aid. Wanda Vázquez Garced mentions in particular the support of the United States and the private sector, but does not cite any specific organization.
These eight million dollars, however, would represent only a meager down payment on the cost of rebuilding such a telescope. Informal estimates shared shortly after the destruction of the site indeed predicted that it would costseveral hundred million dollars .
Officials from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which operated the Arecibo radio telescope, said they were focusing on damage assessment and cleaning efforts. However, when it comes to building a new structure, that's another story.
“NSF has a very well-defined process for funding and building large-scale infrastructure, including telescopes "said Ralph Gaume, director of the agency's Division of Astronomical Sciences. “This is a multi-year process that involves congressional appropriations and assessing the needs of the scientific community. It is therefore very early for us to comment on the replacement “, he added.
Congress, which should allocate federal funding for the reconstruction of Arecibo, also did not allocate money for this purpose during the spending bill of the 2021 financial year adopted in December. However, the report accompanying the bill asked the NSF to assess whether (or not) a comparable technology should be implemented at the same site and, if so, to provide an estimate of the associated costs. /P>
