Schoolchildren from Puerto Rico, visiting the observatory for the day, view the interactive exhibits at the new Angel Ramos Foundation Visitor and Educational Facility on June 12. Frank DiMeo/University Photography
ARECIBO, Puerto Rico To visit Arecibo Observatory, you leave the highway and drive for about 30 minutes up a series of narrow, winding roads into the karst hills region of Puerto Rico. You park in a small area near the administrative offices and hike up a short but steep hill to reach a point where you can look down on the huge aluminum reflector dish and out at the immense structure that supports the apparatus that receives radio signals from space.
Until recently, some 40,000 visitors a year were making the trek to see the largest radio telescope on Earth. While they may have been impressed, even awed, by the sight of the 1,000-foot diameter dish and the 90-ton suspended structure, "They mostly left as ignorant as they came about what radio astronomy is and about what we do here," said Daniel Altschuler, director of the observatory.
No more.
On March 1 of this year, the observatory opened the Angel Ramos Foundation Visitor and Educational Facility, a new visitors center filled with interactive multimedia exhibits rivaling those in major metropolitan science museums. It is now the only science museum on the island. The exhibits and accompanying texts explain the basics of radio astronomy and atmospheric science and describe the work of the scientists using the Arecibo facility.
The primary goal is to educate visitors about science, Altschuler said. "About half of the visitors are schoolchildren. If one in 100 some day becomes a scientist and looks back and says, 'The first thing that got me interested in science was my visit to Arecibo,' it will all be worth it," he said.
Planning for the new visitors center began with Ricardo Giovanelli, a professor of astronomy at Cornell, who was director of Arecibo until 1989. Altschuler, who became assistant director in 1989 and director in 1992, and staff scientist Jo Ann Eder spent almost eight years raising about $1.5 million to construct the building. The Fundación Angel Ramos, a foundation created by a prominent Puerto Rican publisher to support education, provided a matching grant for half the cost of construction. The other half came from government and private sources in Puerto Rico, including Puerto Rican alumni of Cornell. With the building under way, Altschuler obtained a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Informal Science Education Program to create the exhibits.
Altschuler worked with Eileen Zalisk and Peter Martin of Zalisk-Martin Associates of Cambridge, Mass., to lay out the exhibit area and design the interactive exhibits, which were built by Museum Productions of Toronto. The texts for the exhibits were written by Altschuler and by many of the scientists doing research at Arecibo. There are English and Spanish versions of every text.
Visitors first see displays describing the Earth and its place in the cosmos, then move into an area that teaches the basics of astronomy and atmospheric science and describes the tools scientists use to study them, including the Arecibo telescope. Finally they move upstairs to an area that describes the research conducted at Arecibo, which includes studies of the Earth's upper atmosphere, radar mapping of the planets of the solar system, and searches of the sky for pulsars and other exotic objects in and beyond the Milky Way.
Since the center was opened, the number of visitors to Arecibo has increased dramatically. Based on the first three months of operation, Altschuler expects at least 100,000 visitors this year.
The center also includes a 100-seat auditorium in which visitors will see a 15-minute film called "A Day in the Life of the Arecibo Observatory," describing not only the work of Arecibo scientists but also that of the telescope operators, support staff and even the kitchen workers.
The auditorium also will be used for scientific meetings and especially for workshops for elementary school teachers, according to José Alonso, director of the visitors center and former astronomy professor at the University of Puerto Rico. In addition to teaching, he volunteered to work on a National Science Foundation program to reform science education on the island. "The reason I came here was that I saw a unique opportunity to use the facility for education," Alonso said. "What I envision is that this may be an extension of a classroom."
Alonso plans to hold science-teaching workshops for K-12 teachers, covering general science topics as well as specifics of Arecibo research. "There are many such workshops for teachers in San Juan, but there has been no facility like this in central Puerto Rico," Alonso said. "And we can bring teachers here and prepare them so that when they come back with their classes they can be the teachers and explain what we do."
The opening of the visitors center was followed in three months by the inauguration of the upgrade to the Arecibo telescope, which will greatly extend its range and precision and promises many new discoveries.
"The new telescope and the new visitors center will both shed new light to guide the path of future scientists," Alonso predicted.