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Remote camera and drone images of the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope platform have just been released.
The 305-meter main dish rested on the ground in a remote part of Puerto Rico, with a 900-ton platform with receivers and other equipment suspended 150 meters above. On August 10, 2020, one of the many cables supporting the platform broke and administrators shut down operations to investigate, trying to figure out how to take the platform apart in a controlled manner.
Then, on December 1, more cables broke, causing a catastrophic waterfall that sent the platform crashing down, destroying it.
No one was hurt in the collapse, thankfully, but the telescope itself is likely beyond repair.
The incredibly dramatic new video, from the NSF website, shows the view of a camera on the ground as the platform falls. The cables from one of the three support towers snapped first, causing the platform to tip over onto the other two, where it hit a rocky cliff just out of the camera’s field of view.
About a minute later, the view shifts to a drone, which was very close to one of the towers at the time of the collapse. You can see the frayed remains of a previously broken cable. The tension on the cables produces puffs of debris as the paint blows up, and then a main cable comes loose from its support. The sight shifts to the left as another cable snaps and shatters, and the drone grabs the platform just after hitting the cliff face as debris falls. As the view widens, the upper segment of a distant tower on the right can be seen hitting the ground and raising a plume of dust.
There have been calls on Twitter to rebuild, which is generally a good idea, but how it can be done remains to be seen.
The telescope was the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope for decades until China built a larger one in 2016. It has been used to make countless observations, including the very first exoplanets ever. discoveries (in orbit around a pulsar). It could also be used as a radar, pinging near-Earth asteroids to get their shape, size, rotation, and also nail their orbits with precision. No other telescope on Earth has this capability at Arecibo resolution.
This is a huge loss for the astronomical community, and I really hope that a new telescope can be built to replace this monumental observatory.
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