Continuing Arecibo’s Legacy – A Partnership to Save Telescope Data at TACC

Millions of people have seen footage of the famed Arecibo radio telescope’s collapse – due to various hurricanes and other natural disasters – in December 2020. What they would not have seen from those videos was Arecibo’s data center, located outside the danger zone. It stores the “golden copy” of the telescope’s data — the original tapes, hard drives, and disk drives of sky scans since the 1960s. Now, a new partnership will make sure that about 3PB of telescope data is securely backed up off-site and made accessible to astronomers….