[ad_1]
Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory was built in 1963 and was the world’s largest single-unit radio telescope until the FAST was built in China in 2016. After struggling with structural issues for some time, the dish eventually collapsed and the violent destruction was filmed. .
The observatory was designed over a natural sinkhole, and the spherical reflector which consisted of aluminum panels focused incoming radio waves onto a mobile antenna suspended about 550 feet above it. These antennas could be moved in any direction and allowed the device to track a celestial object as it moved across the sky.
In August 2020, one of the cables holding this central platform broke and got stuck in the dish. Three months later, a second cable broke, leading the National Science Foundation to announce that the entire Observatory was in danger of collapse. Unfortunately, it was determined that there was no safe way to repair the cables and it was taken out of service.
On December 1, just days after it was announced that it was taken out of service, the remaining cables snapped and the central platform crashed into the antenna below. The video above captures the collapse from multiple angles, including an aerial photo that dramatically shows the violent banging of the support cables.
The Arecibo Observatory is where scientists first discovered extrasolar planets around pulsar B1257 + 12 in 1992, and also produced a detailed radar map of the surfaces of Venus and Mercury. The Observatory is responsible for determining that Mercury has made a complete rotation once every 59 days, whereas previously it was thought to do so once every 88 days. As well as being responsible for many other discoveries, its unique form has led it to appear in several Hollywood films including the James Bond film, Golden eye.
The collapse of this observatory is widely regarded as the loss of a major historic site by astronomers and scientists around the world.
(via Reddit)
[ad_2]
Source link