The Arecibo Trip

Posted By Bill Nye

2012/02/03 01:09 CST

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By Bill Nye

Audacious -- that's how I describe the Arecibo radio telescope. For me, it was just hard to believe what I was seeing. I have just returned from my first Planetary Society-sponsored trip to Puerto Rico and this historic, remarkable, big idea of a telescope.

The Planetary Society

The Arecibo Radio Telescope

f you're not familiar with this machine designed to explore the cosmos and our own ionosphere, it was conceived in 1958, built by 1963, upgraded and refined in the decades since.

The premise of the story (as we say in writing) was to build a telescope so big that it could and can detect electromagnetic signals at astonishingly low energy levels. These would be signals emanating from high in our own atmosphere as well as from fantastic astronomical distances. The reflector of this machine is too big to move. It fills a whole valley