PUERTO RICO
A Universal Loss
Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory collapsed Tuesday, stunning the international scientific community, which had relied on the radio telescope for more than five decades, the Associated Press reported.
The collapse occurred when the telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform fell onto the reflector dish more than 400 feet below. Before Tuesday’s incident, the telescope had already been damaged when an auxiliary cable snapped in August. A main cable broke last month.
Originally built in the 1960s by the United States Department of Defense, the telescope – once the largest in the world – had survived hurricanes, tropical humidity and recent earthquakes.
Before the accident, the US National Science Foundation had announced that the Arecibo Observatory would be closed, prompting scientists to petition US officials and others to reverse the decision.
Scientists called the collapse “a huge loss:” The telescope has been used to track asteroids on a path toward Earth, conduct Nobel Prize-winning research and determine which planets are potentially habitable.
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