The Arecibo telescope has collapsed

[EFO]

Analyzing Video Footage Of Collapse of Massive Arecibo Telescope
(12:56 min.)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=59WQIRvezzI

"The collapse was on Tuesday morning, but yesterday the NSF made video of the catastrophic collapse available, and so many viewers asked I continue my long tradition of 'coping by analyzing failure' and document what I see in this footage. It's hard to watch because this magnificent structure has always been part of the world of astronomy for me."

[thepainterdoug]

wow something eerie and strange to see. this giant silent peaceful observer has had enough as well, to cap of a dreadful 2020

[Bill Ryan]

Jeez!!! That's a massive amount of damage. I never knew that had happened. This was 6 days ago, at 8 am on 1 December.

One of the main cables had snapped in early November, so there was increased stress on all the others. Prior to that, there had been hurricane damage. Then it all finally gave way.

Here's a Nature article:

• https://nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03421-y

It appears to be totaled. It'd be extremely hard and costly to rebuild this. Here's the wreckage:

[Violet3]

Joseph Farrell did a blog about this a little while ago after the first suspension cable broke in August. A close-up of the cable looked like it might have been sabotaged, since there was no tangle of stressed metal cabling strands but rather what looked like a clean cut. He speculated that maybe there was something being detected by the telescope that someone did not want seen or heard. Interesting that, as Joseph points out, there appears to be absolutely no mention of any speculation about the possibility of sabotage in any of the media reports.

[ExomatrixTV]

Two cable breaks, one in August 2020 and a second in November 2020, threatened the structural integrity of the support structure for the suspended platform and damaged the dish. The NSF determined in November 2020 that it was safer to decommission the telescope rather than to try to repair it, but the telescope collapsed before a controlled demolition could be carried out. The remaining support cables from one tower failed around 7:56 a.m. local time on December 1, 2020, causing the receiver platform to fall into the dish and collapsing the telescope.

• source

China now holds the world's last giant, single-dish telescope after the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope collapsed:

• China's Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) is the largest and last remaining giant, single-dish telescope after Arecibo's collapse.
• As China's moon mission advances, experts say the via its resolution and sensitivity, the FAST telescope will help produce critical research over the next decades.
• Opened in 2016, in November, Chinese state media reported that FAST could welcome foreign scientists in 2021.

After tragedy struck the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on Wednesday, the scientific community mourned the loss of an astronomical landmark.

There is now only one last remaining giant, single-dish, radio telescope in the world: China's 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST).

Completed in 2016 and located in the Guizhou province of southwest China, the observatory cost $171 million and took about half a decade to build. Its sheer size allows it to detect faint radio-waves from pulsars and materials in galaxies far away; 300 of its 500-meter diameter can be used at any one time.

Experts say that in the next decade, FAST is expected to shine in terms of studying the origins of supermassive black holes or identifying faint radio waves to understand the characteristics of planets outside the solar system.

In November, Chinese state media reported that in 2021, the FAST facility would become open to use for foreign scientists.

The National Astronomical Observatory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which oversees FAST, did not immediately respond to comment.


Before and after shots of the Arecibo telescope. NAIC Arecibo Observatory/NSF, Ricardo Arduengo/AFP/Getty Images There were some functions that Arecibo's telescope could do that FAST can't, however.

"For observation within the solar system, Arecibo was able to transmit signals and receive their reflections from planets, a function that FAST isn't able to complete on its own. The feature allowed Arecibo to facilitate monitoring of near-Earth asteroids, which is important in defending the Earth from space threats," Liu Boyang, a researcher in radio astronomy at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, University of Western Australia, told the South China Morning Post.

As Business Insider reported earlier in the week, China has made significant strides within the space race as the US has suffered a setback.


China's Chang'e-5 probe landed on the moon this week, collected lunar samples and the samples have made it back to its orbiter, which will start the process of a weeks-long journey back to earth to deliver the samples.Today, Chinese state media and NASA shared images of China planting its flag on the moon.

• source

China rushes to finish world's largest telescope, not to listen, but, to transmit, July 2015, UFO Sighting News.

• see also:

"The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical (Radio) Telescope" F.A.S.T.; Chinese: 五百米口径球面射电望远镜, nicknamed Tianyan 天眼, lit. "Sky/Heaven Eye".

Currently, the detection of gravitational waves is a hot topic in astronomy. Wu Xiangping, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the FAST Science Committee, introduced that through long-term monitoring of millisecond pulsars, a certain number of millisecond pulsars are selected to form a timing array that can detect low-frequency gravitational waves from supermassive double black holes and other celestial bodies. The ultra-high sensitivity of FAST has improved the timing accuracy of pulsars by at least an order of magnitude, which is expected to enable mankind to have the ability to detect gravitational waves of NHz for the first time.

NHz = nanoHerz = A frequency of 10(-9) Hertz

• source

• nanograv.org

[ThePythonicCow]

The National Academies has just published a report concluding that the zinc spelter filled cable stays in the Arecibo Telescope most likely failed due to the high electromagnetic fields generated by telescope equipment causing currents in the zinc filling, thus allowing the zinc filling to slip out of their proper position and stressing the outer strands of cable until they started to break.

This video explains this, after providing a little bit of background for those who don't recall the collapse of the Arecibo telescope back in 2020, and then summarizes this report.

Quoting from the report, as shown at the 12:47 mark in the video:

The only hypothesis that the committee could develop that provides a plausible but improvable answer to all these questions and the observed socket failure pattern is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope's uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jhv44CduX8k