The Arecibo Observatory was delivered on November 1, 1963 and has been in the service of science ever since. In several movies, Carl Sagan sent a message with him to the globular cluster Messier 13, and for a time it was the largest radio telescope in the world. After two support cables broke, the structure turned out to be inescapable.

One of the best-known radio telescopes in the world, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, has recently suffered severe damage, for which the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that the facility will be closed and dismantled. Space.com.

One of the cables holding the 900-ton structure broke in early August, hitting a large hole in the telescope plate. Experts were only examining whether work could continue nonetheless and whether the unit could be safely repaired when another support cable released the structure in early November. After that, they saw that there was no point in continuing.

Sean Jones, one of the NSF deputy directors, said the most important aspect was fixing the telescope without endangering anyone’s safety. However, after reviewing three different engineering opinions, they came to the conclusion that there is no way to do it.

Ralph Gaume, head of the NSF Department of Astronomical Sciences, said engineers could not say how long the structure had left, but were confident that it would collapse on its own in no time.

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Guame emphasized that NSF will help scientists find a new research location and a new tool that was previously designed to use Arecibo.

The observatory was handed over on November 1, 1963 to scientists who had studied the upper part of the Earth’s atmosphere, among other things, in recent decades, but who had participated in the SETI program for extraterrestrial intelligence research and sent the message. from Arecibo. This happened on November 16, 1974: a message written by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake was shot at a sphere called Messier 13.

It consisted of 1,679 bits that were transmitted for that same number of seconds, just once. The message contained:

  1. numbers between 1 and 10,
  2. the chemical numbers of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus (these are components of DNA),
  3. the formula of sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA
  4. the number of nucleotides in DNA and a representation of the double helix structure of DNA,
  5. a graphical representation of man, the height of an average person, and the Earth’s population (it was 4.5 billion at the time)
  6. charts of Earth’s Solar System, and
  7. the graphs of the Arecibo radio telescope and the dimensions of the transmitting antenna.

Additionally, the device helped locate near-Earth objects in the Solar System, was the site of the 1995 James Bond film The Golden Eye, and was featured in the 1997 film The Relationship, recalls. BBC.

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