MATES is happy to present to you the first MATES Location of the Week. For some weeks, this will be determined by viewership, while in other weeks, special events relating to the MATES subjects or MATES itself will be used to determine the Location of the Week.
This week, MATES has decided that Puerto Rico will be the Location of the Week. One famous thing about Puerto Rico related to the MATES subjects is the Arecibo Telescope. The Arecibo Telescope was a radio telescope near Arecibo, PR, and it used to be the largest single-aperture telescope in the world. It is known for transmitting the Arecibo Message towards the globular cluster Messier 13. The Arecibo Message was a 23 by 73 binary rectangle made to communicate with extraterrestrial life. The message includes information about human number systems, human DNA, the location of Earth in the solar system, and the Arecibo Telescope itself. In the Area 51 Edition of MATES, Travis Ortogero made a 3 by 17 Arecibo Message, while Andrew Luisi '24 wrote about another message to aliens, the Voyager Golden Records. The Arecibo Telescope collapsed on December 1, 2021.