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A huge US space telescope deep in the Puerto Rican jungle will be shut 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, was halted in August when one of its support cables loosened from its grip, falling and tearing a 30-meter (100-foot) hole in its 305 m wide (1,000 ft) reflector plate.
Another cable then broke earlier this month, tearing a new hole in the dish and damaging nearby cables as engineers scrambled to devise a plan to preserve the damaged structure.
The incidents at the site – also famous for the setting of the James Bond movie GoldenEye, as well as Contact with Jodie Foster – prompted the US National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent government agency, to call the facility.
“NSF has concluded that this recent damage to the 305 m telescope cannot be addressed without risking the life and safety of the work crews and personnel,” said Sean Jones, Deputy Director of Mathematics and Physics at NSF on Thursday. .
“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 vast reflector and an 816-ton structure suspended 137m above it, located in the humid forests of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, had been used by scientists and astronomers around the world for decades to analyze distant planets, find potentially dangerous asteroids and hunt. for signatures of extraterrestrial life.
The telescope was instrumental in detecting the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 1999, which laid the groundwork for NASA to send a robotic probe there to collect and eventually return its first sample of asteroid dirt some two decades later.
An engineering firm hired by the University of Central Florida, which operates the observatory for NSF under a $ 20 million five-year agreement, concluded in a report to the university last week “that if an additional main cable would broken, a catastrophic collapse of the whole will soon follow the structure ”.
Citing safety concerns, the company ruled out efforts to repair the observatory and recommended a controlled demolition.
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