Footage, via the National Science Foundation, of the Arecibo Observatory collapse on December 1:
From Nature.com:
The iconic radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has collapsed, leaving astronomers and the Puerto Rican scientific community to mourn its demise.
Engineers had warned that the 900-tonne platform suspended above the telescope’s 305-metre-wide dish could fall at any moment, given that one of the main cables supporting it had snapped in early November. Last month, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the observatory, had announced it would shut down the telescope permanently, citing safety concerns over its instability, and damage too extensive to repair.
The final collapse happened just before 8 a.m. local time on 1 December. No one was injured.
Drone footage of the collapse, released by the NSF two days later, shows cables snapping at the top of one of the three towers from which the instrument platform was suspended. The platform plummets downward and crashes into the side of the dish. The tops of all three towers also snap off.
Prior to the failure, engineers had been exploring options to relieve some of the tension in the cables, including by relaxing other support cables to tilt the towers around the dish. The NSF had not yet decided to move forward with that plan when the platform collapsed. [snip]
Once the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, the Arecibo facility has been the site of many key astronomical discoveries over the years, including observations of the spinning stars known as pulsars that led to the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics. Before its collapse, astronomers were using the telescope for a number of scientific studies, including radar assessments of near-Earth asteroids, to measure their threat to the planet.
A huge loss, in so many ways.
