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On Thursday the National Science Foundation released stunning video footage that captures the exact dramatic moment of the The 900-ton platform of the Arecibo Observatory has fallen in the 1,000 foot wide dish below. A drone was doing a close investigation of the cables that still held the platform above the antenna as the cables snapped Tuesday.
Video from the huge radio telescope shows both footage from the drone and the view from a camera in the visitor center showing the platform falling into the dish just above the jungle floor in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Two massive blocks of the concrete towers to which the cables were attached can also be seen falling.
Two of the cables had previously broken, one in August and another in November, destabilize the telescope.
A drone was inspecting the site at the top of one of the towers, where one of the previous cable breaks had occurred, when the rest suddenly snapped.
NSF recently decided to disable the telescope after a second cable broke in November.
“It was a dangerous situation,” John Abruzzo, who works with an engineering consultancy called Thornton Tomasetti that was hired by the NSF, told reporters Thursday. “Those cables could have failed at any moment.”
On Tuesday they did.
NSF reports that no one was injured in the collapse and that the visitor center suffered only minor damage.
The telescope, which ran for nearly 60 years, was the backdrop for a dramatic fight scene in the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye starring Pierce Brosnan. He also appeared in Jodie Foster’s 1997 film Contact. But Arecibo’s true legacy lies in the many scientific discoveries it has made possible. It explored pulsars, expanded our knowledge of Mercury, spotted exoplanets, and found fast radio bursts.
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