![]() ![]() The radio antenna of the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Space Arecibo observatory classifies sneaky asteroid from.Researchers are still analyzing a backlog of data from Arecibo, the team noted - so the world's most famous dead telescope may still have more scientific gifts to offer us from beyond the grave in the years to come. Arecibo Observatory, located in Puerto Rico, was the world's second-largest single-dish radio telescope until its sudden collapse on Dec. Invisible to our eyes, that radio light has wide wavelengths. ![]() The telescope’s wide dish collected radio waves. It also was a central player in a 1997 science-fiction movie called Contact. It figured in the James Bond action film, GoldenEye. The telescope’s 900-ton instrument platform fell onto the dish due to the failure of support cables, causing tremendous damage to the 1,000-foot telescope. And the telescope’s fame comes from more than just science. In October 2022, the National Science Foundation - which owns the site on which Arecibo was built - announced that the telescope will not be replaced or repaired, much to the dismay of scientists and space lovers around the world. The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was a crucial component of the United States’ radio telescope infrastructure for 57 years, until its collapse. The 900-ton platform crashed into the Arecibo telescopes main dish on December 1, 2020. More recently, Arecibo's observations of asteroids played a direct role in planning NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, in which scientists crashed a spacecraft into the near-Earth asteroid Dimorphos and altered its orbital period by 32 minutes.Īrecibo's career ended abruptly in December 2020, after two critical support cables snapped, leading to the complete collapse of the telescope. Perhaps most famous for its search for extraterrestrial life (as depicted in the movie Contact), Arecibo is home to one of the most powerful radio telescopes on Earth. What are the largest impact craters on Earth? What happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into Earth?
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