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A massive radio telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, one of the largest in the world, collapsed Tuesday after suffering severe damage since August, officials said after 57 years of astronomical discoveries.
The deteriorating telescope’s 900-tonne instrument platform, suspended by cables 450 feet (137 meters) above a 1,000-foot (305-meter) wide bowl-shaped reflector plate, fell Tuesday morning, the National Science Foundation said. United States. No injuries were reported, he added.
The telescope, which received radio waves from space, had been used by scientists around the world to search for possible signatures of extraterrestrial life, study distant planets and find potentially dangerous asteroids. It also gained fame after the pivotal scenes in the 1995 James Bond film “GoldenEye” starring Pierce Brosnan were shot there.
Two cables supporting the reflector had broken since August, causing damage and forcing officials to shut down the observatory as engineering firms held by the University of Central Florida, which runs the observatory, explored ways to repair the damage.
In November, engineering reviews led the NSF and the university to conclude that efforts to repair the facility would be too dangerous and should have been demolished.
NSF said initial results indicated that the top section of all three telescope support towers broke and that when the instrument platform fell, the telescope support cables also fell.
The observatory also includes other scientific assets such as a 12-meter telescope used for radio astronomy research and a facility used to study the Earth’s upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The observatory’s learning center, located next to the telescope, suffered significant damage from falling cables, the NSF said.
“We are saddened by this situation, but thankful that no one was hurt,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a statement. “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.”
NSF said it will authorize the university to continue paying Arecibo staff and come up with a plan to continue research at the observatory. The agency said it did not determine the cause of the initial cable failure in August.
© Thomson Reuters 2020
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