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Arecibo is an astronomical observatory, which is one of the world's most powerful radar-radio telescopes, and stands as the largest single-unit radio telescope in the world. Located some 16 km (10 mi) south of Arecibo, this telescope was made operative in 1963. Located some 12 miles (19 kilometers) from the coastal city of Arecibo.
This facility necessitates staff of 140 around the clock. The majority of them are technicians and engineers, and just about 30 numbers of astronomers and engineers from various countries incessantly busy to fathom the radio signals of the cosmos.

Professor William E. Gordon of Cornell University, who originally intended to use it for the study of Earth's ionosphere, is remembered for initiating the construction of the Arecibo telescope. In the beginning, a fixed parabolic reflector was thought about, with a 150 m (500 ft) tower, pointing in a fixed direction to hold equipment at the focus.
That idea would have suited to a very limited range of applications. Other potential areas of research, such as planetary science and radio astronomy, necessitate the capacity to point at different positions in the skies and to track those positions for an extended period as Earth rotates.
Ward Low of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) came out to specify that imperfection, and kept Gordon involved with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory (AFCRL) in Boston, Massachusetts. Ward Call Low, taught physics at Boston University, where he also served as assistant director of the Upper Atmosphere Research Laboratory. He had also been involved in supervision of development of dozens of technical precision instruments that were installed by the Air Force's pioneering V-2 rockets to record upper atmospheric phenomena. In Boston, Massachusetts, at that time, a team, in the supervision of Phil Blacksmith was working on spherical reflectors and one more group was studying the propagation of radio waves in and through the upper atmosphere.
In the summer of 1958, Cornell University proposed the project to ARPA. Construction work was initiated in the summer of 1960. Because, the main dish is spherical, its focus is along a line, rather than at a single point (as would be the case for a parabolic reflector), this situation did reason to complicate 'line feeds' had to be used to carry out observations. Since the arrangement of the line feeds depend on frequency and only two could be fixed at any one time, this restricted the flexibility of the telescope.

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