Rockets are very impressive. But they're expensive and sometimes go kabang. Spaceships are incredible bits of engineering. They're also expensive, take bloody ages reach their destinations, and when a rocket goes kabang so does the spaceship it's launching.
Enter the three hundred meter wide Arecibo radar dish:
Arecibo can launch a different kind of probe: A probe made of patterned radio waves, that can reach another world at literally lightspeed, and be back on Earth with its information in minutes.
And radio waves don't go kabang.
Thanks to this one-of-a-kind facility humankind discovered the ice hidden in the craters at the poles of Mercury....
Image above: The RADAR bright signatures of water ice, as first seen by the radio pulses sent from Arecibo.
.....we can probe the surface of the Moon at will and get regular high resolution RADAR videos of asteroids in deep space. Like this one of an asteroid that passed Earth the other week:
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