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The faces self exploration eroticism lauren hana chailegendary 1,000-foot-wide Arecibo Observatory's telescope, a giant dish embedded in the verdant Puerto Rico forest, experienced a major collapse on Dec. 1. A 900-ton platform suspended over the observatory fell, destroying much of the already crumbling dish. On Thursday, the U.S. National Science Foundation released footage of the collapse from two different angles:
At 10 secondsinto the video below, a camera affixed to a control tower captures a cable snapping, and then the platform falls. Dust soon rises from the destruction.
Just after the one-minute mark, a drone was in opportunistic position to film cables violently snapping from a support tower.
The collapse was a dramatic end for the historic telescope. "I feel sick in my stomach," Ramon Lugo, a former NASA engineer who manages Arecibo for the National Science Foundation, told Sciencethe morning of the collapse. "Truthfully, it was a lot of hard work by a lot of people trying to restore this facility. It’s disappointing we weren’t successful. It’s really a hard morning."
Credit: Courtesy of the Arecibo Observatory, a U.S. National Science Foundation facility
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In nearly 60 years of peering into space, the powerful Arecibo Observatory, and its astronomers, made legendary discoveries. Arecibo spotted the first-ever exoplanet (a planet beyond our solar system) and detected the first organic molecules in a galaxy 250 million light-years away, supported Nobel Prize-winning research, and detected around 100 near-Earth asteroids (some that could potentially pose a danger to Earth) each year.
Famously, Arecibo also scoured the skies for signals from intelligent alien life. (We haven't received any signals, that we're aware of, yet.)
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Meanwhile, nature gradually degraded the structure: Earthquakes and the infamous Hurricane Maria damaged the aging telescope. Then in August 2020, the first cable broke, leaving a telltale 100-foot gash in the radar dish.
More cables would soon fail.