#PUERTO RICO TELESCOPE MOVIE#

On December 1, as our team was driving up the mountain to the observatory, the platform collapsed. Griffin, a demolition contractor, to review the situation. SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico The National Science Foundation announced Thursday that it will close the huge telescope at the renowned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in a blow to scientists. Hoping for the best – and preparing for the worst – we contacted D.H. So just before Thanksgiving, we recommended that the telescope be disassembled.ĭuring the fourth week of November, the project team was in constant communication, logging the number of wires broken each day and assessing the state of the telescope. All options to save the structure were unlikely to succeed, and wires had begun to break more often due to the higher stress. It was a race against time, since the cables' component wires continued to break, further elevating stresses on the remaining cables. At this point, Thornton Tomasetti became engineer of record for emergency repairs, construction engineering and final repairs.Ĭollaborating with the contractors, other engineers, the University of Central Florida and the observatory owner, the National Science Foundation, we developed a long list of ideas for increasing load capacity and making the structure safe enough to repair. But at the request of the observatory, we were instead retained by the observatory operator (University of Central Florida) to determine the adequacy of the damaged structure and design the repairs. Initially, one of the contractors seeking to perform emergency repairs asked us to support emergency construction services. But before the job could be awarded, a cable came loose from its socket, putting the replacement program on hold while the project shifted to emergency assessment to understand the effect of the cable loss on the entire structure. In August 2020, replacement of a single cable was planned, and proposals sought for the work. The massive telescope on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico located at the Arecibo Observatory and deteriorating since August collapsed on Tuesday, officials said, after 57 years of. Six Months After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricos Famous Telescope Is Still Under Threat ARECIBO, PUERTO RICOThe drive to the Arecibo Observatory from San Juan is breathtaking in both. The collapse was devastating also for many Puerto Ricans, for whom the observatory was culturally significant. Over the years, cables were inspected, and one (a back stay, which supports one of the three towers) was replaced in 1981. Puerto Rico’s massive Arecibo telescope, famous for its stellar contributions to astronomy, collapsed on Tuesday, leaving many among the scientific community in shock and anguish. Six of the 18 cables had been added in the 1990s to support a 300-ton increase in instrument load. SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) The National Science Foundation said Friday that it could cost up to 50 million just to clean up the debris at a renowned radio telescope that collapsed last. Scientists worldwide have used it to track asteroids on a path to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and determine if a planet is potentially habitable.The telescope comprised a spherical reflector that covered an area nearly equivalent to 11 soccer fields, with 18 cables (from towers to instrument platform) suspending an instrument array 150 meters above.

#PUERTO RICO TELESCOPE MOVIE#

The telescope boasts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film “Contact” and the James Bond movie “GoldenEye” and had been operating for 57 years. 6, one of the telescope’s main steel cables snapped, causing further damage and leading officials to warn that the entire structure could collapse. An auxiliary cable broke in August and tore a 100-foot hole in the reflector dish and damaged the dome above it. A massive radio telescope at Puerto Ricos Arecibo Observatory - one of the worlds largest - collapsed on Tuesday after sustaining severe damage since August, officials said, following 57 years. The independent, federally funded agency said it’s too dangerous to keep operating the single dish radio telescope - one of the world’s largest - given the significant damage it recently sustained. SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO > The National Science Foundation announced today that it will close the huge telescope at the renowned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in a blow to scientists worldwide who depend on it to search for planets, asteroids and extraterrestrial life.

Puerto rico telescope