How the famed Arecibo telescope fell--and how it might rise again (sciencemag.org)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Daniel Clery
Jan. 14, 2021 , 11:52 AM

In the early morning of 10 August 2020, Sravani Vaddi, a postdoc astronomer at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, was working from home, but her thoughts were at Arecibo’s giant radio telescope. At 2 a.m., she had one precious hour to focus the 305-meter dish on NGC 7469, a distant galaxy. At its center, two supermassive black holes wheeled around each other, following an earlier galaxy merger. Vaddi wanted to see whether having two dark hearts instead of the usual one made the galaxy shine more brightly by stirring up gases and stoking starbirth. Radio emissions from the glowing gases would help her find out.

When she checked in near the end of her observations, computer servers suggested the telescope wasn’t pointing at the galaxy anymore. She couldn’t get an on-site telescope operator on the phone, so she gave up and went to bed.

She woke up to a full inbox. At 2:45 a.m., toward the end of her slot, an 8-centimeter-thick steel cable, one of 18 suspending a 900-ton instrument platform high above the dish, had pulled out of its socket at one end and fallen, slicing into the dish. “I was totally shocked. How could a cable break?” she says. Although she didn’t know it at the time, the photons she gathered from NGC 7469 would be the last ones Arecibo would ever scoop up.

The rest of the story is now well known. A second support cable snapped 3 months later, on 6 November, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the observatory, said attempting repairs was too dangerous: Arecibo would be dismantled. On 1 December, fate took control as more cables snapped and the platform, as heavy as 2000 grand pianos, came crashing down into the dish.
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more: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/how-famed-arecibo-telescope-fell-and-how-it-might-rise-again?

A longish article, with interesting engineering details. Not exactly LBN, but a worthy post-crash reflection.

[regnaD kciN]

1. It would be great if they could build the replacement...

...but trying to raise $400 million (at least), with government support unlikely, is pretty daunting. I wish a few of the tech world's billionaires would pool their resources for this.