Arecibo Observatory Telescope Collapses, Ending An Era Of World-Class Research

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Arecibo Observatory’s mammoth telescope collapsed overnight. It’s seen here in November, after a cable damaged its dish.





University of Central Florida



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University of Central Florida





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Arecibo Observatory collapsed when its 900-ton receiver platform fell hundreds of feet, smashing through the radio dish below.





Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images



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Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images



Science
World-Renowned Arecibo Radio Telescope Set To Be Dismantled

Researchers have been mourning the telescope’s loss since the NSF announced its looming demise last month. Astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute compared it to learning your high school has burned down, or to losing a big brother. Doing research at the facility was like going to a wonderful summer camp, he wrote in a recent farewell message to Arecibo.

«While life will continue, something powerful and profoundly wonderful is gone, Shostak said.

Here’s how planetary scientist Ed Rivera-Valentin described one aspect of Arecibo’s importance earlier this year, on NPR’s Short Wave podcast:

«One of the really neat things about the Arecibo Observatory is that it’s a very versatile scientific instrument. Most telescopes, most radio telescopes, don’t have the ability to send out light. They only capture light. At the observatory, we can send and capture light. When an asteroid’s coming by, we are pretty much a flashlight that we turn on. We send radar out to it, and that radar comes back… We can tell you how far these objects are down to a few meters.

«And we care about where these asteroids are going to be because what if, one day, this thing comes around and gets too close to Earth? But if we can let people know this is going to happen next year, we can actually prepare for it. Like, the dinosaurs — they didn’t have a space program, so they didn’t get to prepare for anything.

The idea for the observatory was conceived in the late 1950s by Cornell University professor William E. Gordon, who was looking to build a huge tool to explore the Earth’s atmosphere and the composition of nearby planets and moons.

The site in Puerto Rico was chosen «to take advantage of the vicinity to the Equator and of the topography of the terrain, which provided a nearly spherical valley and minimized excavation, according to a lecture by longtime Cornell astronomy professor Martha Haynes.

The telescope underwent major upgrades in both the 1970s and 1990s, allowing researchers to expand its role. Built with federal funds, Cornell managed Aricebo for decades before the University of Central Florida took up that role.

Aricebo and Puerto Rico have withstood natural calamities in recent years, including Hurricane Maria in 2017 and a series of earthquakes earlier this year.