It is known for its world_famous facility, the Arecibo radio telescope, where scientific studies have been carried out and Hollywood movies filmed (most recently GoldenEye and Contact).
Less popular is that there is at 18°29' N and 66°26' W since 1966 a facility for launching sounding rockets. Since 1966 several rockets of the types Nike Apache, Nike Jarvelin, Nike Iroquois, Nike Tomahawk, Black Brant, Taurus Orion and Terrier Orion were launched from there.
Arecibo is located on the north coast of the island, about 50 miles west of San Juan and the metropolitan area, or approximately a 1_hour trip by car. It has a small noncommercial airport, which has not had airline flights in about two decades. Arecibo's main shopping malls are Plaza del Atlántico and Plaza del Norte.
In sports, Arecibo used to have two professional franchises, the Lobos de Arecibo in baseball and the Capitanes de Arecibo in BSNbasketball. The Lobos have had slightly better luck than the Capitanes, winning the 1983 national baseball championship and the 1983 Caribbean World Series, the only time the franchise won both titles. At that time, they had MLB prospect Dickie Thon, then also of the Houston Astros, on their roster. Thon then suffered a life-threatening and career-affecting eye injury during an Astros game in 1984. The Lobos ceased operation a decade later.
The Capitanes have not had much luck in their basketball tournaments, but in 2002, they started to turn things around, losing in 7 games in semifinals to the Vaqueros, after having a 3-0 game lead in the series.
Rocket launches from Arecibo (http://www.astronautix.com/sites/arecibo.htm)
The Arecibo telescope is distinguished by its enormous size; the main collecting dish is 305 m in diameter, constructed inside the depression left by a karst sinkhole.
The Arecibo telescope's dish surface is made of 38,778 perforated aluminium panels, each measuring about 1 m by 2 m (3 ft by 6 ft), supported by a mesh of steel cables.
Arecibo was also the source of data for the SETI@home distributed computing project put forward by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.
Arecibo random-code data from late 1992 also reveal a backscatter enhancement from the north polar ice cap which is slightly weaker than the south polar echo at the same wavelength.
Arecibo random-code reflectivity maps from 1990 indicate that the main channel of Ares Vallis southeast of the lander site is moderately (on rock scales) than the terrain through which it flows, but neither it nor the lander site itself are unusually rough in an absolute sense.
DSN Goldstone system, Arecibo will be very much the dominant instrument in the field although the limitated declination coverage of the Arecibo antenna means that the Goldstone system will continue to play an important role in providing both coverage at declinations outside Arecibo's coverage and measurement of wavelength dependent properties.
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