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Break.
The legendary 1000-foot-wide Arecibo Observatory telescope, a giant dish embedded in the verdant forest of Puerto Rico, experienced a major collapse December 1. A 900-ton platform suspended above the observatory fell, destroying much of the already crumbling dish. The United States’ National Science Foundation on Wednesday released images of the collapse from two different angles:
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AT 10 seconds in the video below, a camera attached to a control tower captures a snapping cable, then the platform falls. Dust soon rises from destruction.
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Just after the one minute mark, a drone was in an opportunistic position to film violently broken cables from a support tower.
The collapse was a dramatic end for the historic telescope. “My stomach hurts,” said Ramon Lugo, a former NASA engineer who heads Arecibo for the National Science Foundation. Science the morning of the collapse. “Honestly, a lot of people have worked hard to restore this facility. It’s disappointing that we weren’t successful. It’s really a tough morning.”
Credit: Courtesy of Arecibo Observatory, an establishment of the National Science Foundation of the United States
In nearly 60 years of scanning space, the powerful Arecibo observatory and its astronomers have made legendary discoveries. Arecibo spotted the very first exoplanet (a planet beyond our solar system) and detected the first organic molecules in a galaxy 250 million light years away, supported Nobel Prize-winning research and detected around 100 near-Earth asteroids each year (some of which could potentially pose a threat to Earth).
Famous, Arecibo has also scoured the skies for signals from intelligent alien life. (We haven’t received any signals, to our knowledge, yet.)
The National Science Foundation knew the observatory was in dire straits. Just 12 days before the collapse, the organization announced its intention to decommission the telescope after it had fallen into a dangerous state of disrepair. The organization had cut funding for the aging observatory as it sought outside financial partners.
During this time, nature gradually degraded the structure: earthquakes and the infamous Hurricane Maria damaged the aging telescope. Then in August 2020, the first cable broke, leaving a telltale 100-foot gash in the radar antenna.
More cables would fail soon.
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