The National Science Foundation released shocking video footage on Thursday The 900-ton operating system of Arecibo Lab collapsed Below is a 1,000-foot-wide dish. As the cables crashed on Tuesday, a drone conducted a very close investigation into the cables.
The video of the giant radio telescope shows both drone shots and footage coming from a camera in the center of the viewer, falling onto the dish on stage above the forest floor in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Two large particles of cement towers to which the cables were attached could be seen collapsing.
Two cables were broken earlier, one in August and the other Another in November, Disrupting the telescope.
A drone was inspecting the area on top of one of the towers, causing one of the previous cable breaks and the rest to break abruptly.
The NSF recently decided to reduce the telescope after the second cable broke in November.
“This is a dangerous situation,” John Abruzzo, of the engineering consultancy firm Thornton Tomacetti, which contracted with the NSF, told reporters on Thursday. “Those cables could have failed at any moment.”
On Tuesday, they did.
The NSF said no one was injured in the crash and that the visitor center suffered only minor damage.
The telescope, which has been in operation for nearly 60 years, was the backdrop to a dramatic fight scene in the 1995 James Bond film. பொன்விழி With Pierce Brosnan. It also appeared in the 1997 film Jodi Foster Get in touch. But there is a real legacy of Arecibo Many scientific discoveries It is possible. It explored pulsars, expanded our knowledge of Mercury, discovered exoplanets, and detected rapid radio explosions.