Following Hurricane Georges' devastating sweep through the Caribbean last week, early reports from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico indicate the facility's massive reflector dish sustained minimal damage, and the 15 employees and visitors using the observatory at the time of the hurricane are safe.
Snuggled into a bowl-shaped area in the hills of central Puerto Rico, the radio-radar telescope, operated by Cornell's National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) under cooperative agreement with the NSF, received a $25 million upgrade in June 1997.
After the hurricane swept across Puerto Rico on Sept. 21, officials at the NAIC heard from employees at the observatory that a small number of panels on the telescope's 1,000-foot diameter reflector had suffered damage from flying debris. The surface of the Arecibo reflector dish is made of 38,800 reflective aluminum panels, covering an area about the size of 26 football fields. But the dome above the telescope, completed during the upgrade, survived without damage.
As the eye of the hurricane passed just to the south of the telescope on Sept. 21, 15 people remained at the observatory, said Donald Campbell, associate director of the NAIC. All were "bunkered down" and protected from the hurricane, he said.
Interestingly, at the time of the hurricane, Carl Ulbrich, a Clemson University professor emeritus, and researchers from France were making radar observations of thunderstorms. Instead, they used Arecibo's dish to record observations of high-altitude wind speeds as the hurricane whipped through the area, by using electrical power from an emergency generator.
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