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A huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century collapsed on Tuesday, officials said.
The telescope’s 900-ton receiving platform fell onto the reflective dish more than 400 feet below.
The National Science Foundation of the United States had earlier announced that the Arecibo observatory would be closed. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100-foot gash on the 1,000-foot-wide (305 m) reflector dish and damaged the receiver platform that was suspended above. Then a main cable broke in early November.
The collapse stunned many scientists who had relied on what until recently was the world’s largest radio telescope.
“It’s a huge loss,” said Carmen Pantoja, an astronomer and professor at the University of Puerto Rico who used the telescope for her doctorate. “It was a chapter in my life.”
Scientists around the world had asked U.S. officials and others to reverse the NSF’s decision to shut down the observatory. NSF said at the time that it intended to reopen the visitor center and restore operations to the observatory’s remaining assets, including its two Lidar facilities used for upper atmosphere research and l ionosphere, including analysis of cloud cover and precipitation data.
The telescope was built in the 1960s with money from the US Department of Defense as part of a campaign to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses. It has endured hurricanes, tropical humidity, and a recent series of earthquakes in its 57 years of operation.
The telescope has been used to track asteroids on their way to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize, and determine if a planet is potentially habitable. It also served as a training ground for graduate students and attracted around 90,000 visitors per year.
“I am one of those students who visited it when I was young and who were inspired,” said Abel Mendez, professor of physics and astrobiology at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo who used the telescope to the research. “The world without an observatory loses, but Puerto Rico loses more.”
He last used the telescope on August 6, just days before a plug containing the broken auxiliary cable failed in what experts believe was a manufacturing error. The National Science Foundation, which owns the observatory operated by the University of Central Florida, said teams that assessed the structure after the first incident determined that the remaining cables could support the extra weight.
But on November 6, another cable broke.
A spokesperson for the observatory said there would be no immediate comment, and a spokeswoman for the University of Central Florida did not return requests for comment.
Scientists had used the telescope to study pulsars to detect gravitational waves as well as to search for neutral hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures form. About 250 scientists around the world were using the observatory when it closed in August, including Mendez, who was studying the stars to detect habitable planets.
“I’m trying to recover,” he said. “I am still very affected.”
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