Posted on 08/15/2020 9:27:04 AM PDT by BenLurkin
On Monday (Aug. 10), an auxiliary cable supporting a platform that is suspended above the 1,000-foot-wide (300 meters) radio dish broke and crashed into the telescope's reflector panels, creating a gash in the dish measuring about 100 feet (30 m) long.
In a news conference with reporters Friday (Aug. 14), Arecibo director Francisco Cordova said that 250 of the observatory's primary reflector dish panels were damaged, along with several support cables underneath the dish. But observatory officials have not yet fully assessed the extent of the damage or determined the cost of the repairs needed to get the 56-year-old radio telescope — once the largest single radio dish on Earth — back in action.
Cordova said that the auxiliary cable was designed to last at least another 15 to 20 years, so it's not clear why the cable failed. It was one of several auxiliary cables that were added to the observatory in the 1990s to help support a new addition to the telescope, called the Gregorian dome, which houses an antenna receiver on the platform.
No one was injured when the accident happened at approximately 2:45 a.m. EDT (0645 GMT) on Monday, as the facility was closed at the time.
The Arecibo Observatory has been shut down indefinitely until the telescope can be repaired. While the observatory is best known for its work in the search for life and potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, astronomers use it for a variety of space research and observations. Some of the work that has been put on hold until the telescope is fixed include studies of gravitational waves and pulsars, Cordova said.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
two possibilites:
1. substandard engineering and/or poor maintenance in a 3rd world rain-forest where everything constantly rusts, corrodes and rots ...
2. space aliens who got tired of being eavesdropped on ...
Monkeys.
It was those damn monkeys.
Monkeys monkeying around.
Purchased a Chinese cable, that is my guess.
Both good possibilities, so definitely it was the aliens.
the accident happened at approximately 2:45 a.m. EDT (0645 GMT)
*************
Middle of the night. Wonder if there are cameras to monitor the facility 24X7?
Has David Vincent gotten there yet?
SETI couldn’t find aliens if they got laser blasted by them.
;-)
Aliens; it was aliens. We’re getting too close...
“1. substandard engineering and/or poor maintenance in a 3rd world rain-forest where everything constantly rusts, corrodes and rots ...
^^^^^^^^^^^
The video I saw of the damage, it sure appears that the whole facility was in need of a coat of paint it looked a bit run down. I guess Hollywood wasn’t in town to shoot another movie around the facility. (Contact / GoldenEye)
It could be a simple as “stuff gets old and breaks.”
Radio astronomy goes on night and day. It's odd that it was idle. Arecibo was originally funded in part by the Navy to perform ionospheric studies, but they pulled out decades ago. It's been something of an orphan, really. The Chinese build a larger passive array (and had to relocate an entire village to do so) but Arecibo was still the largest active radio telescope (radar).
Security is obviously an issue, considering the location.
nothing else on pr worth destroying, i put my money on the commie/leftists
BTW, the Aricebo dish is incredibly large. For me anyway, most things are larger in my imagination than they are in real life. Cathedrals, battlefields, and even the Grand Canyon, were smaller than I thought they would be. Surprizingly, dish at Arecibo was much, much larger than I imagined.
Exactly.
Stanton Friedman on SETI: Silly Effort To Investigate
They need to talk to the people that maintain the Brooklyn Bridge!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
