NASA-funded Arecibo Planetary Radar system was tested for the first time since hurricane Maria with a successful detection of near-Earth asteroid 2007 AG. This object at its closest approach to Earth will be some 0.059 AU and is estimated to be 300 meters in diameter

Columbia, MD and Puerto Rico — December 22, 2017. After several months of downtime since Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico, the Arecibo Observatory Planetary Radar has returned to normal operation, providing the highest-resolution images to date of near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon during its December 2017 close approach to Earth. The radar images, which are subtle at the available resolution, reveal the asteroid is spheroidal (roughly ball-shaped) and has a large concavity, or depression, at least several hundred meters in extent near its equator, and a conspicuous dark, circular feature near one of the poles. Arecibo’s radar images of Phaethon have resolutions as fine as about 250 feet (75 meters) per pixel. Read More

The Arecibo Observatory invites you to submit proposals for the use of the HF facility during 2018. HF experiments at Arecibo are scheduled by demand in periods of 5-7 days around new moon. Proposals should specify the associated diagnostics required: the incoherent scatter radar (ISR), active and passive optical instruments and others.

Marvelous results from the HF campaign performed on November 2015 at Arecibo Observatory. “We have performed an experiment to compare as directly as realizable the ionization production rate by HF radio wave energy versus by solar EUV.” This paper shows that radio-frequency production of artificial ionospheres is possible at mid-latitudes in a similar efficiency as high latitudes. This paper open the possibility to study the role of electron acceleration in the space plasma energy redistribution.