RIP Arecibo, 1963–2020
4 min readNov 20, 2020
The news this week that the Big Dish at Arecibo has reached the end of its life has hit the astronomy and SETI communities hard. Let’s look back over the working life of this amazing telescope.
An Ambitious Project
In the early 1960s, William E. Gordon from Cornell University designed a telescope to study the ionosphere.