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ARECIBO, PUERTO RICO – A huge already damaged radio telescope in Puerto Rico that played a key role in astronomical discoveries for over half a century collapsed completely on Tuesday.
The telescope’s 900-ton receiving platform and its Gregorian dome – a structure as tall as a four-story building housing secondary reflectors – fell on the northern portion of the vast reflector more than 400 feet below.
The US National Science Foundation had previously announced that it would close the radio telescope. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 30-meter (100-foot) gash on the 305-meter (1,000-foot) wide dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.
The collapse stunned many scientists who had relied on what was until recently the largest radio telescope in the world.
“It sounded like a rumble. I knew exactly what it was,” said Jonathan Friedman, who worked for 26 years as an associate researcher at the observatory and still lives near it. “I was screaming. Personally I was out of control. … I have no words to express it. It’s a very deep, terrible feeling.”
Friedman ran up a small hill near his home and confirmed his suspicions: A cloud of dust hovered in the air where the structure once stood, demolishing the hopes of some scientists that the telescope could somehow be repaired.
The collapse at 7:56 am on Tuesday came as no surprise because many of the thick cable wires holding the structure snapped over the weekend, Ángel Vázquez, director of operations at the telescope, told The Associated Press.
“It was a snowball effect,” he said. “There was no stopping it … it was too much for the old woman to bear.”
He said it was extremely difficult to say if anything could be done to prevent the damage that occurred after the first cable snapped in August.
“Maintenance has been maintained in the best possible way,” he said. “(The National Science Foundation) did the best they could with what they had.”
However, observatory director Francisco Córdova said that while NSF decided it was too risky to repair damaged cables prior to Tuesday’s crash, it believes there had been options, such as relieving tension in some cables or using helicopters to help redistribute weight.
Meanwhile, installing a new telescope would cost up to $ 350 million, money the NSF doesn’t have, Vázquez said, adding it should come from the US Congress.
“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 US officials and others to reverse the NSF’s decision to close the observatory. NSF said at the time that it intended to eventually reopen the visitor center and restore operations at the observatory’s remaining assets, including its two LIDAR facilities used for superior atmospheric and ionospheric research, including cloud cover analysis and of precipitation data. The LIDAR facilities are still operational, along with a 12-meter telescope and a photometer used to study photons in the atmosphere, Vázquez said.
“We are saddened by this situation, but thankful that no one was hurt,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a statement. “When engineers informed NSF that the facility was unstable and posed a danger to Arecibo teams and staff, we took their warnings seriously.”
The telescope was built in the 1960s with money from the Department of Defense in the midst of a push to develop ballistic missile defenses. It had endured hurricanes, tropical humidity and a recent series of earthquakes in its 57 years of operation.
The telescope was used to track asteroids on a path to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize, and determine if a planet is potentially habitable. It also served as a training camp for graduate students and attracted around 90,000 visitors a year.
“I’m one of those students who visited it as a young man and got inspired,” said Abel Méndez, professor of physics and astrobiology at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo who used the telescope for research. “The world without the observatory loses, but Puerto Rico loses even more”.
The last time he used the telescope was on August 6, just days before a socket holding the auxiliary cable snapped failed in what experts believe may be a manufacturing error. The National Science Foundation, which owns the observatory run by the University of Central Florida, said crews who evaluated the facility after the first crash determined that the remaining cables could carry the additional weight.
But on November 6 another cable broke.
Scientists used the telescope to study pulsars to detect gravitational waves and to search for neutral hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed. About 250 scientists around the world had used the observatory when it closed in August, including Méndez, who was studying the stars for habitable planets.
“I’m trying to recover,” he said. “I’m still very impressed.”
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