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© Satellite image © 2020 Maxar Technologies
The Arecibo Observatory as seen by Maxar’s WorldView-2 satellite on December 6, 2020. Satellite image © 2020 Maxar Technologies
The destruction of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was photographed from space.
The telescope collapsed earlier this month, following damage from Tropical Storm Isaias in August.
Strong winds from the storm damaged a 3-inch-thick auxiliary suspension cable attached to a 900-ton central radio platform. Before engineers could fix that cable, another broke in November. Soon after, the National Science Foundation decided to decommission and dismantle the structure in a controlled manner.
But Arecibo had other plans. On the morning of December 1, the telescope catastrophically failed, dropping its 900-ton radio platform 450 feet to the ground. The platform crashed into a 1,000-foot-wide disc below and with it knocked down the tops of three support towers, destroying the facility.
“It’s hard to take. It’s like losing someone important in your life,” Abel Mendez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, previously told Business Insider.
Cameras on a control tower and a drone recorded video of the moment. Ashley Zauderer, the NSF program manager at Arecibo Observatory, described the collapse as “a very violent and unpredictable failure.”
Now, the extent of this failure can be seen from orbit, thanks to the imaging satellites operated by the company Maxar.
A spatial view of the fall of an iconic observatory
In the two images below, the consequences of the cable failure in early November can be seen alongside the telescope’s subsequent catastrophic collapse. The first photo shows the approximately 100-foot-long hole that a cable failure in August drilled in the reflector dish, and which the November cable failure widened further.
Maxar also posted close-up cropped images from the original satellite photos.
The before-and-after comparison using the images above, below, shows more detail.
The two images below compare the Arecibo observatory from when it was in working order to the last image of Maxar, which its WorldView-2 satellite took on Sunday.
Arecibo was one of only two such radio telescopes in the world – Chinese FAST is the other. But his death could lead to a more powerful American replacement in the future.
Astronomers are already rallying to push the new Biden administration to such an effort and for Congress to fund it.
“A reconstructed Arecibo would be an important scientific instrument in many fields, including gravitational waves,” Saavik Ford, an astrophysicist at the City University of New York and the American Museum of Natural History, wrote to an astronomy mailing list just before the collapse of the observatory. .
She added: “Reconstruction is a choice that would bring both economic benefits and (above all) scientific advancement.”
Aylin Woodward, Morgan McFall-Johnsen and Susie Neilson contributed reporting.
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