The huge Arecibo radio telescope, which had been used for decades to investigate radio waves from deep space back to the early moments of the universe is now a ruin. The instrumentation hanging at the focal point of the of the telescope above the enormous reflector, has collapsed into the reflector. The telescope, which survived hurricane Maria could not survive the Trump administration’s ongoing neglect of Puerto Rico and science.
Here’s the tweet by the photographer, Deborah Martorell in Spanish of the lead photograph.
The telescope was still being used for science until a cable broke in August when the first cable holding up the instrument platform broke. The NSF hired an engineering team to devise plans to repair it, but the engineers were concerned that fixing it would not be safe because they were concerned that the remaining cables were too weak to allow workers on site to repair it. www.nsf.gov/...
On Aug. 10, 2020, an auxiliary cable failed, slipping from its socket in one of the towers and leaving a 100-foot gash in the dish below. NSF authorized Arecibo Observatory to take all reasonable steps and use available funds, which amounted to millions of dollars, to secure the analysis and equipment needed to address the situation. Engineers were working to determine how to repair the damage and determine the integrity of the structure when a main cable connected to the same tower broke Nov. 6.
The second broken cable was unexpected -- engineering assessments following the auxiliary cable failure indicated the structure was stable and the planning process to restore the telescope to operation was underway. Engineers subsequently found this 3-inch main cable snapped at about 60% of what should have been its minimum breaking strength during a period of calm weather, raising the possibility of other cables being weaker than expected.
The National Science foundation planned to decommission the telescope after the cable broke but said that two cables were strong enough to hold up the instrument panel. Another cable broke on the sixth of November, and nothing could be done to save the instruments because it was unsafe. Researchers were pleading with NSF to repair the telescope and continue operations, but now hope is lost. The reflector has been wrecked by the falling instruments.
It’s a ruin. www.theguardian.com/...
“I am one of those students who visited it when young and got inspired,” said Abel Mendez, a physics and astrobiology professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo who has used the telescope for research. “The world without the observatory loses, but Puerto Rico loses even more.”
He last used the telescope on 6 August, just days before a socket holding the auxiliary cable that snapped failed in what experts believe could be a manufacturing error. The National Science Foundation, which owns the observatory that is managed by the University of Central Florida, said crews who evaluated the structure after the first incident determined that the remaining cables could handle the additional weight (…. snip...)
Scientists had used the telescope to study pulsars to detect gravitational waves as well as search for neutral hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed. About 250 scientists worldwide had been using the observatory when it closed in August, including Mendez, who was studying stars to detect habitable planets.
“I’m trying to recover,” he said. “I am still very much affected.”