This past January, the Arecibo Observatory became the classroom for students from the Miami University in Ohio. Dr. Qihou Zhou, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the university, has held the “Undergraduate Hands-on Experience with Incoherent Scatter Radar” three-week winter term course at the observatory for the past six years. Read More

The CARLA project, lead by Arecibo Observatory (AO) scientist Dr. Jens Lautenbach (PI) and Dr. Pedrina Terra dos Santos (Co-I), was recently awarded funding by the Puerto Rico Science Technology & Research Trust. CARLA will deliver information about aerosol properties over time and altitude in order to study the dynamics of aerosol layers, including the Saharan Air Layer which influences cloud and hurricane formation and the air quality. 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.