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The National Science Foundation on Thursday released stunning video footage capturing the exact dramatic moment when The 900-ton platform of the Arecibo Observatory fell on the 1,000 foot wide plate below. A drone was conducting a close-up investigation of the cables still holding the platform over the platter when the cables broke on Tuesday.
Video from the huge radio telescope shows both footage from the drone and a view from a camera in the visitor center showing the platform falling onto the plate just above the jungle floor in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Two massive chunks can also be seen falling from the concrete towers to which the cables were attached.
Two of the cables had been broken previously, one in August and another in november, destabilizing the telescope.
A drone was surveying the site atop one of the towers, where one of the previous cable breaks had occurred, when the rest suddenly snapped.
The NSF had recently decided to dismantle the telescope after a second cable broke in November.
“It was a dangerous situation,” John Abruzzo, who works with an engineering consulting firm called Thornton Tomasetti that was contracted by the NSF, told reporters. “Those cables could have failed at any time.”
On Tuesday they did.
The NSF reports that no one was injured in the collapse and that the visitor center suffered only minor damage.
The telescope, which operated for almost 60 years, was the backdrop for a dramatic fight scene in the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye with Pierce Brosnan. It also appeared in the 1997 Jodie Foster film Contact. But Arecibo’s true legacy lies in the many scientific discoveries it made possible. It explored pulsars, expanded our knowledge of Mercury, detected exoplanets, and found fast radio bursts.
