Arecibo Observatory telescope aficionados know that the dish starred in GoldenEye, the most recent James Bond film, and reappears next month in Contact, the film based on Carl Sagan's book. But they may not know that the telescope and its environs also star in a yet-to-be-published, butler-less murder mystery.
The book, written in 1987 by Colin O. Hines, a retired professor of atmospheric sciences, is titled, appropriately, Murder at Arecibo.
Hines, now living in Toronto, explained that he thought Arecibo made the perfect backdrop for his fictional work, as it depicts life at the observatory and Puerto Rico.
After writing the book, he distributed copies to his colleagues and friends at the observatory, deliberately leaving out the final chapter. And then he held a party to ask his guests to guess the murderer. Only two partiers guessed correctly.
Want to see a copy of Murder at Arecibo? It's available at the observatory's library, which provides a very good reason for visiting the tropics.
But unless you read Murder at Arecibo, Hines will refuse to reveal who dunnit. He gently suggests: "Read the book."
Being a telescope on a tropical island has its advantages, such as the ability to examine the heavens from the equator. Being the cables holding the aiming structure of that telescope has its disadvantages: corrosion.
Meet José Maldonado. In 1968, Maldonado was part of a team responding to an underground electric-line disaster at the telescope. The underground cables -- which supplied electric power to the observatory -- had partially corroded. He redesigned the 3-mile-long electric system going to the observatory, so now it is above ground and easy to service. And that's when he moved from working for the power company to Arecibo Observatory.
Maldonado, now assistant director for the observatory's facilities, found that he was facing an even greater problem. The cables supporting the telescope's aiming structure were showing signs of corrosion.
The cables are thick, braided strands of wire anchored by concrete blocks wedged into the karst terrain. If those cables corrode, the 900-ton aiming structure would collapse on the aluminum dish.
In 1974, working with Cornell engineers, Maldonado found that high-pressure air could be pumped in between the braids, and he devised a system to pump dry air through the cables.
After more than two decades of monitoring the cables under this system, Maldonado says the humidity-free air seems to be doing the trick. The cables have shown no signs of corrosion.
Bill Gordon, the former Cornell professor of electrical engineering who first conceived of the Arecibo Observatory, stopped by one of the exhibits at the new visitors center Saturday. His picture was on it. The exhibit provides a history of how the observatory was placed on a farm, and it shows the sinkhole-laden terrain that eventually became the home for the observatory.
The spherical dish sits in a nearly perfect geological bowl, but engineers needed to remove some of the earth first to make it just a little more perfect.
As dirt was taken out, rain moved some of the dirt to the bottom of the natural bowl, clogging the natural, porous "drain."
Gordon, standing at the exhibit, explained that during the building process, that clog created a small lake. He joked, "We called it La Cayugita."
Under the party tent, during the observatory's second upgrade inauguration festivities Saturday, Joe Vellozzi looked pleased.
He had good reason. He is the telescope project manager for the engineering firm of Amman & Whitney, the group that took drawing-board concepts and turned them into reality for the original construction and its subsequent upgrades. Vellozzi has been an engineer on this project for more than three-and-a-half decades.
Prior to taking on the Arecibo project, Vellozzi engineered Eero Saarinen's design for Washington's Dulles Airport. He designed the airport's cable system that acts as the roof of the airport and also ensures the roof does not collapse onto the airport's glass facade.
Vellozzi applied to the Arecibo Observatory many of the same engineering principles he used for Dulles Airport. But during his time on the Arecibo project, Vellozzi says, he has developed a "sense of awareness" of what the observatory's astronomers want and need, as well as how precise the engineering of the dish must be.
To see the telescope bringing in fresh, useful data pleases the engineering project manager. "I feel a lot of pride about this," he said.
Talk about star clusters.
The University of Puerto Rico graduated three astronomers in the class of 1983, including the first Puerto Rican woman to become a professional radio astronomer.
Where are they now?
Carmen Pantoja, José Alonso and Abraham Ruiz are the three astronomers from the University of Puerto Rico's Class of '83. Alonso is now the director of the new visitors center at the observatory, and Ruiz is an astronomy professor at his alma mater. Pantoja is an astronomer with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., and she attended the Arecibo ceremony Saturday. As an undergraduate, Pantoja went from majoring in biology to physics and then to astronomy.
"I remember how mysterious it seemed," she said of astronomy. "I was inspired by the presence of the Arecibo Observatory."