The world’s second-largest radio telescope crashed on Tuesday morning.
The Arecibo Observatory’s 900-ton platform, which sent and received radio waves and suspended 450 feet (140 meters) in the air, crashed into a 1,000-foot (300-meter wide) disc below. When it fell, it pulled down along the tops of the three surrounding support towers.
The crash videos show that it started when the cables connecting the platforms hanging together from one of the towers broke. Earlier, an auxiliary cable on the same tower broke in August, then one of its main cables broke in November.
Since then, the National Science Foundation, which owns Are Recipes, has been rushing to disassemble the telescope, as it was clear that a complete collapse was possible.
But the platform collapsed before the engineers could go much further in the deconstruction process.
Jonathan Friedman, who has been part of the Are Resibo Observatory’s scientific staff since 1993, told local news outlet Noticentro that the fall felt like an earthquake, a train or an avalanche.
The following video, captured from a nearby control tower, drops to the platform at 7:54 a.m. local time. A cable pulls out the catwalk which allows engineers to reach the platform.
The top of the tower where the cables are broken, appears in the background, then falls. Then the top of the second broken tower turns left at the bottom of the hill.
NSF Shared a video of the catastrophic collapse of the Ci Resibo telescope on Tuesday morning. It’s loud.
(Courtesy Arecibo Observatory, NSF Facility) pic.twitter.com/9zvyrUsfJl
– Morgan McAfee L-Johnson (Morgan M Johnson) December 3, 2020
“As you can see, this was a very violent and kind of surprising failure,” Ashley Zoudrer, NSF’s program manager at the Arelibo Observatory, said in a briefing on Thursday.
In a separate video, drone footage shows snapping cables and a crash resulting from above. The drone was re-awakening on the telescope’s platform at the time, as the drone was a major source of surveillance information for engineers trying to figure out how to deconstruct the telescope.
Due to the known risk of collapse, the lucky cable broke in mid-November and no one was allowed to reach the unstable structure.
NSF That said, the space around Dish and the three towers were cordoned off so no one was injured in the fall.
Inevitable collapse
The spiral below Orisibo began in August, when a 3-inch thick supporting cable on one of the telescope’s three towers came out of its socket and crashed into the dish. It rips a 100-foot gash into the panels.
(Arecibo Observatory)
Then another failure, the Snapdragon main cable, surprised telescope operators in November. An engineering assessment later found that the remaining cables were responsible for breaking at any time and sending the platform malfunction.
The technician was too unstable to save his structure without risk when he was working on repairs, so the NSF decided to say goodbye to Arecibo, canceling the world’s most famous radio telescope.
The hole after the second cable failure on 19 November 2020. (Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty Images)
A blow in search of alien life
In his 57-year career, Arecibo discovered signs of dangerous, alien life for asteroids close to Earth and discovered the first planet outside our solar system.
In 1974, Arecibo sent the most powerful broadcast to Earth to communicate with potential aliens. In 2016, it received the first repeated rapid radio explosions: mysterious space signals that scientists now think come from dead stars.
Arecibo’s huge dish antenna, built in frustration on the floor of the Puerto Rican forest, reflects radio waves from space into its suspended platform.
Abel Mendez, director of the Planetary Habitat Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, said the loss of binoculars in the search for humanity for radio waves sent by other lifeforms was a major setback. That’s because Arecibo and China’s five-hundred-meter-wide circular radio telescope (FST) were the Earth’s “two big eyes” in radio astronomy.
“If you lose ci recipes, then you lose the ability to monitor – 24 hours a day – an obscure source of radio signals,” Mendez told Business Insider before the fall, “if you’re looking at a source of interest that has a weak radio spectrum. So, you need two big radio telescopes: one pointing at something during the day and the other at night. “
Other National Science Foundation facilities – the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia – could collect some of Arecibo’s data collection, but they were not as sensitive to weak radio signals as Aresibo.
Dave Mosher contributed to the report.
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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