Photos show the Arecibo telescope before and after the collapse

• The Arecibo Observatory’s radio telescope collapsed Tuesday morning when its 900-ton suspended platform crashed into the massive dish below.
• Arecibo was one of the best radio astronomy tools on Earth for 57 years. His death is a blow to asteroid tracking efforts and the search for extraterrestrial life.
• Photos of the iconic telescope show what it looked like before and after the accident.
• Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.

The huge radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory collapsed Tuesday morning. Its 900-ton platform crashed into the 1,000-foot lateral disc below, pulling down the top of three support towers as it fell.

The disappearance was not entirely a surprise. After the telescope suffered two cable breaks in August and November, the National Science Foundation, which owns the telescope, determined that it was too structurally defective for workers to safely repair it. The Foundation dismantled the Puerto Rico telescope in late November and engineers were working to figure out how to deconstruct it. But the rig crashed before work could progress.

Courtesy of the Arecibo Observatory, a facility of the US National Science Foundation.

“Friends, it is with deep regret to inform you that the Arecibo Observatory platform has just collapsed,” said Deborah Martorell, a meteorologist in Puerto Rico. tweeted in Spanish on Tuesday morning.

Before the crash, the telescope’s massive platform hung 450 feet in the air above its giant bowl-shaped disk. The disk reflected radio waves from space to the instruments on the suspended platform.

Universal Image Group via Getty Images

But on Tuesday morning, the cables connecting the platform to one of the towers broke, causing it to plummet.

Jonathan Friedman, who has worked on the scientific staff of the Arecibo Observatory since 1993, told local news outlet NotiCentro that the collapse sounded like the roar of an earthquake, a train or an avalanche.

Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty Images

A life spent hunting asteroids and starring in movies

Since it was completed in 1963, the Arecibo telescope has played a role in some of humanity’s most exciting discoveries of space.

It discovered the first known planet beyond our solar system, sent powerful transmissions for potential aliens to intercept, and tracked potentially dangerous asteroids to see if they could impact Earth.

It even helped scientists confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity by detecting the first binary pulsar – a compact, highly magnetized star orbiting another star.

Arecibo also allowed researchers to search for radio waves of potential alien technology. The only other radio telescope to match Arecibo’s previous power is China’s 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST).

The scale and stage of the telescope also brought him to life on screen: he starred in the 1995 James Bond film “GoldenEye” and the 1997 film “Contact,” starring Jodie Foster.

Francois Duhamel / Sygma via Getty Images

Scientists around the world mourn the loss of the Arecibo telescope, but it was especially important to many in Puerto Rico, where it attracted 90,000 visitors a year. It also served as a training ground for graduate students in astronomy, physics, and other space-related disciplines.

“When I heard the news, I was totally devastated,” Abel Méndez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo, told Business Insider in November after the telescope was decommissioned.

Mendez had been with the observatory since he was 10 years old and worked with him professionally for a decade.

“It’s hard to accept. It’s like losing someone important in your life,” he said. “Yes, 2020 is not good.”

Morgan McFall-Johnsen, Aylin Woodward, and Dave Mosher contributed reports.