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An iconic observatory telescope that appeared in the James Bond film Golden eye it collapsed, a few weeks after the decommissioning was announced.
It’s a final blow to one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth that has aided astronomical discoveries for 57 years and has withstood hurricanes, earthquakes and tropical storms.
The location was also the setting for the 1995 climax Golden eye, Pierce Brosnan’s first outing as Bond.
The engineers assessed the damage and determined that all three of the telescope’s support towers broke, causing the 900-tonne instrument platform to plummet to the dish below.
The telescope support cables also fell. The observatory’s learning center was also severely damaged by falling cables.
The collapse came just weeks after NSF announced the telescope would be dismantled and disassembled through controlled demolition after suffering irreparable damage earlier this year.
“The instrument platform of the 305-meter telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico fell overnight. No injuries were reported. NSF is working with stakeholders to assess the situation. Our top priority is to maintain safety. NSF will release more details when they are confirmed, “according to a tweet from the National Science Foundation.
“NSF is saddened by this development. As we move forward, we will look for ways to assist the scientific community and maintain our strong relationship with the people of Puerto Rico,” the foundation said in another tweet.
The spherical radio / radar telescope includes a 305-meter-diameter radio dish and a 900-tonne instrument platform suspended nearly 140 meters above it. Cables connected to three towers hold the telescope in place.
“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 and continued to emphasize the importance of safety for all involved.
“Our goal is now to assess the damage, find ways to restore operations elsewhere in the observatory, and work to continue supporting the scientific community and the people of Puerto Rico.”
An auxiliary cable detached from a socket on one of the towers in August, creating a 30-meter gap in the dish. Engineers were considering and working on a plan to repair the damage when another main cable on the tower broke on November 6.
When it broke, the cable crashed into the reflector plate below, causing further damage.
After the November 6 outage, engineers inspected the rest of the cables and discovered new breaks and slips from some of the tower sockets. Several engineering firms have looked into the damage.
They determined that the telescope could collapse because it is “in danger of catastrophic failure” and the cables were weaker than expected.
The latest review revealed that damage to the telescope could not be stabilized without risking the personnel and construction team. This led to the NSF making the decision to disable the telescope after 57 years.
“We believe the facility will collapse in the near future if left untouched,” according to a letter from engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti which assessed the observatory ahead of the November 19 decommissioning announcement.
“Controlled demolition, designed with a specific collapse sequence determined and implemented with the use of explosives, will reduce the uncertainty and danger associated with collapse.”
The company also recommended that this be done “as soon as pragmatically possible”.
Those plans were underway when the telescope collapsed.
NSF will also ensure that Arecibo personnel are paid and repair research tools, such as the roof of the Light Detection and Ranging facility, or LIDAR, and the 12-meter telescope used for radio astronomy research.
The NSF had planned to preserve as much of the observatory as possible to allow the facility to serve as a hub for research and education in the future, as well as for the restoration of operations at the observatory. It is not yet known how this collapse affects those plans or whether the foundation was able to migrate all archive data collected by the telescope to off-site servers.
Of interest is the LIDAR geospatial research facility, the visitor center and the off-site facility in Culebra for analyzing rainfall and cloud cover data.
Over the years, the Arecibo Observatory has revealed new details about our planet’s ionosphere, the solar system and the worlds beyond it.
The telescope has supported and contributed to important discoveries in radio astronomy and planetary and solar system research, including gravitational waves.
The Arecibo telescope played a key role in the discovery of the first planet outside our solar system and helped astronomers identify potentially dangerous asteroids en route to Earth.
Observations made by the telescope helped uncover the first binary pulsar in 1974 (which led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993), supported NASA’s Viking mission, produced the first radar maps of the surface of Venus, and identified the first exoplanet in 1992.
More recently, Arecibo detected organic molecules in a distant galaxy and discovered the first repetitive fast radio burst.
The observatory was completed in 1963 and has been managed by the NSF since 1970. It is managed and operated by a team at the University of Central Florida, Universidad Ana G. Méndez and Yang Enterprises Inc.
“Arecibo has been an incredibly productive facility for nearly 60 years,” Jonathan Lunine, physics professor David C Duncan and chair of the astronomy department at Cornell University, said in a statement following the decommissioning announcement.
The telescope was designed and built by Cornell.
“For the Cornell scientists and engineers who took a bold dream and made it come true, for the scientists who made new discoveries with this extraordinarily powerful planetary radio telescope and radar, and for all the young people who have been inspired to become scientists. at the sight of this huge telescope in the middle of the island of Puerto Rico, the demise of Arecibo is an inestimable loss, “said Professor Lunine.
Scientists worry about ongoing projects using the Arecibo telescope, as well as what it means for future detections, particularly of asteroids approaching Earth.
After the announcement of the decommissioning, NASA released a statement.
“Arecibo’s planetary radar capability, funded by NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) observing program, has been one of the two major planetary radar capabilities,” the organization said.
“It allowed NASA to fully characterize the precise orbits, sizes and shapes of some NEOs that pass within radar range after they are discovered by wide-field optical telescope detection projects.”
But even NASA’s fully operational Goldstone Observatory in California will be able to characterize these objects, “so that NASA’s NEO research efforts are not affected by the planned dismantling of the 305m Arecibo radio telescope.”
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