Araceibo

Forum: Spacesettlers
Thread: Araceibo

# 10524 bysailorbarsoom@... on Feb. 28, 2008, 6:34 p.m.
Member since 2021-10-03

It's easy to find information on Araceibo's stupendous size: a
thousand feet across; about eighteen acres; if you put thirteen
football fields together, it's bigger than that.

What I can't find anywhere is how much the thing *weighs*. Or more to
the point: what is its mass? I mean the dish itself; naturally the
concrete towers are pretty massive.

Why? Well, I've hear claims to the effect that you could, in HEO,
build a dish the size of Araceibo which would only mass as much as an
SUV or two. So naturally, I'm interested in how big of one you could
build if you had the same mass as Araceibo.

I just found out that Araceibo has trouble studying Solar System
objects further than Saturn. Seems the Earth's rotation causes the
radar beam to sweep by too quickly. An "Araceibo" in HEO wouldn't
have that problem. It could point at Neptune or whatever as long as
needed, and then swing through 180 in any direction and observe
something else (something else the original Araceibo can't do... and
neither can a Lunar Farside radio telescope).