[ad_1]
A huge American space telescope located deep in the Puerto Rican jungle is shutting down after suffering two destructive misadventures in recent months, ending 57 years of astronomical discoveries.
Operations at the Arecibo observatory, one of the largest in the world, stopped in August when one of its support cables detached from its socket, falling and opening a 30-meter (100-foot) hole in its span 305 meters wide (1,000 feet). reflective plate.
Then another cable snapped earlier this month, opening a new hole in the plate and damaging nearby cables as engineers scrambled to come up with a plan to preserve the damaged structure.
The incidents at the site, also famous for the setting of the James Bond film GoldenEye, as well as Contact, starring Jodie Foster, led the US National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent government agency, to suspend the installations.
“NSF has concluded that this recent damage to the 305 m telescope cannot be addressed without endangering the life and safety of the work crews and personnel,” said Sean Jones, deputy director of mathematics and physical science management at NSF.
“NSF has decided to begin the planning process for a controlled decommissioning,” Jones said.
Engineers have not yet determined the cause of the initial cable failure, an NSF spokesperson said.
The observatory’s large reflector dish and an 816-ton structure suspended 137m above it, located in the humid forests of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, has been used by scientists and astronomers around the world for decades to analyze distant planets and find asteroids. potentially dangerous and looks for signatures of alien life.
The telescope was instrumental in detecting the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 1999, laying the groundwork for NASA to send a robotic probe there to collect and eventually return its first sample of asteroid debris some two decades later.
An engineering firm hired by the University of Central Florida, which operates the NSF observatory under a $ 20 million five-year agreement, concluded in a report to the university last week “that if an additional trunk cable fails, a catastrophic collapse of the entire structure will soon follow ”.
Citing safety concerns, the company ruled out efforts to repair the observatory and recommended a controlled demolition.
Source link
