Photos show the Arecibo telescope before and after the collapse

• The Arecibo Observatory’s radio telescope collapsed on Tuesday morning when its 900-ton suspended platform crashed into the huge dish below.
• Arecibo has been one of the best radio astronomy tools on Earth for 57 years. His death is a blow to the asteroid search efforts and the hunt for alien life.
• Photos of the iconic telescope show what it looked like before and after the crash.
• Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

The huge radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory collapsed on Tuesday morning. Its 900-ton platform crashed into the 1,000-foot side disc below, tearing off the tops of three support towers as it fell.

The disappearance was not entirely a surprise. After the telescope suffered two cable breaks in August and November, the National Science Foundation, which owns the telescope, determined that it was too structurally unsanitary for workers to safely repair. The Foundation decommissioned the Puerto Rico telescope at the end of November and engineers were trying to find a way to deconstruct it. But the platform crashed before this work could progress.

Courtesy of Arecibo Observatory, a National Science Foundation installation

“My friends, it is with deep regret to inform you that the Arecibo Observatory platform has just collapsed,” said Deborah Martorell, meteorologist in Puerto Rico, tweeted in Spanish Tuesday morning.

Before the crash, the telescope’s massive platform hung 450 feet in the air above its giant bowl-shaped disc. The disc reflected radio waves from space to the instruments on the suspended platform.

Universal Images Group via Getty Images

But on Tuesday morning, the cables that connected the platform to one of the towers broke, causing it to fall.

Jonathan Friedman, who has worked with the scientific staff at the Arecibo Observatory since 1993, told local media NotiCentro that the collapse sounded like the rumble of an earthquake, train or avalanche. .

Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty Images

A life spent chasing asteroids and staring in movies

Since its completion in 1963, the Arecibo telescope has played a role in some of humanity’s most exciting discoveries in space.

He discovered the first known planet beyond our solar system, sent out powerful emissions that would-be aliens could intercept, and tracked potentially dangerous asteroids to see if they could hit Earth.

It even helped scientists confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity by detecting the first binary pulsar: a compact, highly magnetized star orbiting another star.

Arecibo also enabled researchers to search for radio waves of potential alien technology. The only other radio telescope that equals Arecibo’s ancient power is China’s Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST).

The telescope’s scale and frame also led him to a life on screen: he starred in the 1995 James Bond film “GoldenEye” and the 1997 film “Contact”, starring Jodie Foster.

François Duhamel / Sygma via Getty Images

Scientists around the world are mourning the loss of the Arecibo telescope, but it was of particular importance to many in Puerto Rico, where it attracted 90,000 visitors a year. It has also served as a training ground for graduate students in astronomy, physics and other disciplines related to space.

“When I heard the news, I was totally devastated,” Abel Mendez, director of the Planetary Habitability Lab at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, told Business Insider in November after the decommissioning. of the telescope.

Mendez had been around the observatory since he was 10 and worked with him professionally for a decade.

“It’s hard to take. It’s like losing someone important in your life,” he said. “Yeah, 2020 – that’s not good.”

Morgan McFall-Johnsen, Aylin Woodward and Dave Mosher contributed reporting.