Remote camera and drone footage of the crash of the Ci Resibo Radio Telescope platform have just been released.
The main 05-meter dish sat on the ground in a remote part of Puerto Rico, with a platform with 90,000 tons of receivers and other equipment suspended 150 meters above it. On August 10, 2020, one of the many cables supporting the platform broke, and operators stopped the operation to investigate, trying to figure out how to lower the platform in a controlled manner.
Then, on December 1, more cables broke, causing a devastating cascade, which destroyed the platform when it collapsed.
No one was injured this fall, thankfully, but the binoculars themselves are likely to be out of repair.
The surprisingly dramatic new video of the NSF website shows the view from the ground camera as the platform collapses. The cables of one of the three support towers broke first, so the platform turns down towards the other two, where it hits a rock just outside the camera’s view.
In about a minute, the view switches to the drone, which was very close to a tower at the time of the crash. You can see the scattered remnants of the previously broken cable. The stress on the cable produces a puff of flying debris, and then the main cable moves away from its support. The scene is left as another cable snaps and flails, and the drone catches the platform and hits the rock beneath the debris. As the view expands, the top of the distant tower on the right can be knocked to the ground and a plume of dust can be raised.
There have been calls to rebuild on Twitter, which is usually a good idea, though it remains to be seen how that can happen.
The telescope was the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope until China built a major one in 2016. It was used for numerous observations, including the very first exoplanet (pulsar rotation) ever discovered. It can be used as a radar, pinging asteroids closer to Earth to pinpoint their shape, size, orbit, and their rotation. No other telescope on Earth has that capability in the resolution of Arecibo.
This is a great loss to the astronomy community, and I very much hope that a new telescope can be built to replace this monumentally important observatory.
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