#areciboobservatory
Arecibo radio telescope’s massive instrument platform has collapsed
On Monday night, the enormous instrument platform that hung over the Arecibo radio telescope's big dish collapsed due to the failure of the remaining cables supporting it. The risk of this sort of failure was the key motivation behind the National Science Foundation's recent decision to shut down the observatory, as the potential for collapse made any attempt to repair the battered scope too dangerous for the people who would do the repairs.
Right now, details are sparse. The NSF has confirmed the collapse and says it will provide more information once it's confirmed. A Twitter account from a user from Puerto Rico shared an image that shows the support towers that used to hold the cables that suspended the instrument platform over the dish, now with nothing but empty space between them. ...
Seismic signatures:
Apparently there is a seismic observatory only tens of meters away from the telescope dish. The station code is AOPR [0].
After retrieving the mseed data from the web API using curl, and installing obspy from pip, I could plot the events. This is the result: [1]. You can see two "events". One at Nov 30, 23:12 UTC, and a second, larger one at Dec 1st, 11:52 UTC. Upon closer inspection, the first event is actually multiple smaller ones, not sure if they are related to the collapse at all. The second event is clearly one discrete thing though. The image was uploaded to twitter at 11:56 UTC, so minutes within the collapse being recorded on the seismograph. You can still see the dust in the air.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25266181
Image: https://imgur.com/a/FjrbWWa
#Arecibo #AreciboObservatory #RadioAstronomy #Astronomy #obituary
