Why collapse of the Arecibo telescope is a loss for astronomy - The giant radio telescope had special features that aren’t easily replaced

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The telescope was popularised beyond the scientific community by the 1995 James Bond film 'GoldenEye', starring Pierce Brosnan, and Jodie Foster’s 1997 film 'Contact'.

On December 1, the 900-metric ton platform of scientific instruments suspended above the Arecibo telescope crashed down into the dish. The disaster marks the end of Arecibo’s 57-year tenure as one of the world’s premier radio telescopes.

 

Edgard Rivera-Valentín first visited the Arecibo Observatory as a little kid.

“I definitely remember this feeling of just being awestruck,” Rivera-Valentín says. “Looking at this gigantic telescope … getting to hear about all this neat work that was being done … it definitely leaves an impression.” Important science was happening right in the backyard of Rivera-Valentín’s hometown of Arecibo, Puerto Rico — and someday, Rivera-Valentín wanted to be a part of it.

 

As an adult, Rivera-Valentín returned to the observatory to work as a planetary scientist, using Arecibo to map the shapes and motions of potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids. Now at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Rivera-Valentín continues to use Arecibo data to study planetary surfaces. So the recent news that the Arecibo Observatory would shut down was “heartbreaking.”

 

In August and November, two cables supporting a 900-metric-ton platform of scientific instruments above Arecibo’s dish unexpectedly broke. After assessing the damage, the National Science Foundation, which funds Arecibo, announced that the telescope could not be safely repaired and would be torn down (SN: 11/19/20). But before the telescope could be dismantled, the entire instrument platform crashed down into the dish on December 1.

 

For Puerto Rico, losing Arecibo is like New York losing the Empire State Building, or San Francisco losing the Golden Gate Bridge, Rivera-Valentín says — but with the added tragedy that Arecibo was not just a cultural and historic icon, but a prolific research facility.

“The loss of Arecibo is a big loss for the community,” says Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va. “The life cycle of Arecibo was really quite remarkable, and it did some amazing science.”

 

The observatory’s radar maps of the moon and Mars, for example, helped NASA pick landing sites for the Apollo (SN: 5/1/65) and Viking missions (SN: 7/17/76). And observations of the asteroid Bennu helped NASA plan its OSIRIS-REx mission to snag a sample from the space rock (SN: 10/21/20). Arecibo views of Saturn’s moon Titan have revealed hydrocarbon lakes on its surface (SN: 10/1/03).

 

Beyond the solar system, Arecibo has observed mysterious flashes of radio waves from deep space, called fast radio bursts (SN: 2/7/20), and the distribution of galaxies in the universe. Arecibo has also been used for decades in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SN: 11/7/92), and it beamed the first radio message to aliens into space in 1974 (SN: 11/23/74).

 

In the wake of Arecibo’s collapse, the radio astronomy community is “going to have to look at what was going on at Arecibo and figure out how to replace as best we can some of those capabilities with other instruments,” Beasley says.

 

 

ctnd here --

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/arecibo-telescope-collapse-loss-big-deal-astronomy-video

 

 

 

 too much reading... Now time to watch some action vids---

 

 

After suffering damage in recent months, the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed on December 1. Cables that suspended a platform of scientific instruments above the dish snapped, causing the platform to fall into the dish.