That pretty well finalizes that, I suppose…
(tl:dr the dish collapsed fully, ending the concerns it was already irreparable from prior spontaneous disassembly and needed to be fully dismantled, but was too precarious even for that)
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At least we avoid years of arguing about how exactly to take it down.
Now we need a really big near miss from an asteroid to light the fire under the folks who need to decide to rebuild.
Of course it’s possible at this point that Elon will beat them to the punch by building one that will fit into a Starship. We can call it the Eric T. Cartman Space Radio Telescope.
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Sweet!
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Damn! I was really looking forward to “Contact 2”, since “Contact” was the best movie adaptation of a book ever, and Mathew Mconaghuay (sp?) needs a new project.
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Elle only started at Arecibo. She’d moved on to the VLA by the time the signal arrived.
Lack of Carl Sagan is a more rate limiting step.
And the movie Contact was very good. Except the ending. They dumbed it down a LOT. And lost a major plot point in doing so.
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The telescope had originally been constructed in 1963 using a grid of cables. It worked so well that E Systems got a contract in 1973 to fabricate and install aluminum panels between the cables to form a mostly solid surface. Arecibo had a Control Data Corporation computer but E Systems did not. I worked at CDC and they came to us to complete a program for aligning the antenna to a tolerance of 0.20". I did the programming and remember that the output was a table of how many quarter turns to turn large turnbuckles on each of the hold down cables.
Maintaining a huge array of cables in the jungle for 57 years may not be as impressive as a rocket to the moon but I’m impressed!
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As I understand it, the tolerances were improved again in the 90s when the gregorian dome was installed. When the first cable broke, the views shared under the dish were sort of surprising to me. I never expected that you would have to mow under it for example.
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I recall them discussing that a problem was getting vegetation to grow under the dish, which was always in the shade. Without vegetation, erosion would destroy the foundations. I guess they succeeded and the next problem was to mow.
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In the movie, 006 falls and smashes to a crumpled heap in the dish at Arecibo. Now we find out it wasn’t all that solid, 006 would have probably put a big hole in it.
Without Googling, name that Bond Film…go!
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That’s easy… Goldeneye. Pierce Brosnan as 007 and Sean Bean dies, yet again, as 006
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I always found it interesting. Of course the jungle / intricate facility makes for good action in a spy movie, but knowing that Arecibo was actually capable of transmitting was something that made it a little more fun to watch (versus knowing most radio telescopes can’t do that). I mean it’s not meant for transmitting to an HEO satellite, but could totally imagine a spy hijacking it for the purpose.
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Dear internet, please have video of the collapse.
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Arecibo was the receiver of the data which fed the SETI super computer project. In the latter 1990s, there appeared a Screen Saver from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which used personal computers to calculate the probability of intelligent patterns, from radio signals received at Arecibo, then created a networked feedback which formed the biggest super computer ever created. Follow-ons included Oracle’s grid computing, and then Cloud Computing, which seems to exist everywhere now. This Star Trek stuff usually started with Star Trek.
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I used to run the seti@home screensaver on my old desktops as a kid, and ran it on my Beowulf cluster in the early 2000s when I was getting more into distributed computing
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Video here
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The drone footage is crazy! Was it the drone, or did the support column sway when the load released?
At first I wondered if the drone was enough to initiate the failure, but the strap on the cables was probably not a good idea. I wonder if they were attempting to raise something on that line when it failed.
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Scott Manley pointed out that there had been an earthquake in the area that coincided with the failure. They probably had the drone up checking for further damage from the quake.
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Per the article:
NSF, which oversees Arecibo, had been doing hourly monitoring of the observatory with drones, ever since engineers warned that the structure was on the verge of collapsing in November.
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Good video plus slow motion of the cables breaking.
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Slow motion was pretty cool!
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