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The second largest radio telescope in the world crashed on Tuesday morning.
The Arecibo Laboratory’s 900-ton operating platform, which received radio waves and was suspended in the air at 450 feet (140 meters), collided with a 1,000-foot (300-meter) disc below. When it fell, it was shot down with the tops of the three surrounding support towers.
Inactive videos show that the suspended platform started when the cables connecting one of the towers broke. Previously, the secondary cable of the same tower broke in August, Its only The main cables broke in November.
Since then, the National Science Foundation, owned by Arecibo, has rushed to disassemble the telescope because it was clear that a complete collapse was possible.
But the stage collapsed before the engineers could make much progress in the reconstruction work.
Jonathan Friedman, who has been on the scientific staff of Arecibo Lab since 1993, told local news agency Noticentro The collapse sounded like the sound of an earthquake, train or avalanche.
The video below, captured from a nearby control tower, shows him falling off the stage at 7:54 am local time. A cable exits the gateway, which allows engineers to access the site.
The top of the tower where the cables are broken, visible in the background, then falls. The top of another tower that’s broken is rolling down the hill to the left.
NSF On Tuesday morning, I shared video footage of the catastrophic collapse of the Arecibo telescope. It’s noisy.
(Courtesy Arecibo Laboratory, an NSF facility) pic.twitter.com/9zvyrUsfJl
– Morgan McBall-Johnson (or Morgan M. Johnson) December 3, 2020
“As you can see, this is a very violent and unpredictable failure,” Ashley Sadder, NSF project manager at Arecibo Labs, told a conference Thursday.
In a separate video, the drone footage shows the cables breaking and consequently crashing from above. Drone surveillance was carried out on the drone platform because drone surveillance was important information for engineers trying to figure out how to rebuild the telescope.
Due to the known risk of collapse, no one was allowed to access the unstable structure after the cable broke in mid-November.
The area around the antenna and the three towers were demarcated, so no one was injured in the fall, the NSF said.
The inevitable collapse
Arecibo’s downward spiral began in August, when a 3-inch-thick secondary cable protruded from its socket in one of the telescope’s three towers and collided on the dish. He tore 30 feet away in the panels and threw.
(Arecibo Lab)
The second fault, the broken main cable, took telescope operators by surprise in November. After a technical evaluation, it was found that the remaining cables were responsible for breaking the platform at any one time.
The NSF decided to say goodbye to Arecibo and take down the best radio telescope in the world, as the system was so unstable without the risk of technicians falling over while working on repairs.
Hole after second cable failure on November 19, 2020 (Ricardo Ardungo / AFP / Getty Images)
A step towards the search for alien lives
In its 57-year mission, Arecibo has hunted down dangerous meteorites near Earth, searched for signs of alien life, and discovered the first planet beyond our solar system.
In 1974, Arecibo’s very powerful Earth transmission was so far sent to communicate with potential aliens. Fast radio bursts were rediscovered in 2016 – mysterious space signals that scientists now think come from dead stars.
Arecibo’s largest satellite dish, a depression On the ground in the Puerto Rican jungle, radio waves reflected from space to its suspended base.
Abel Mendes, director of the Planetary Habitat Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, said the loss of the telescope was a major blow to humanity in its search for radio waves transmitted by other life forms. This is because Arecibo and China’s five-hundred-meter-wide spherical radio telescope are the “two big eyes” of the Earth in (fast) radio astronomy.
“If you lose Arecibo, you lose the ability to monitor – 24 hours a day – the weak source of radio signals,” Mendes said. He told Business Insider Before the crash, he said, “If you’re looking for a source of interest in the faint radio spectrum, you need two large radio telescopes – one that points to something during the day and the other at night.”
Other National Science Foundation facilities – the National Radio Astronomy Laboratory in Virginia and the Green Bank Laboratory in West Virginia – may take some data from Arecibo, but are not as sensitive to weak radio signals as Arecibo.
Dave Mosher contributed to the report.
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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