![]() football fields wide! Once radio waves from space hit the dish, they were collected by detectors in a dome above it. So the dish needed to be large to collect the radio waves. 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. “For those of us who use Arecibo and had hoped to use it in the future, it’s a disaster,” she says of the news.Īnd the telescope’s fame comes from more than just science. That list could help scientists learn how large collections of stars and planets form. Data from Arecibo helped her start a list of areas in space filled with hydrogen, an important gas. Haynes had been using this telescope, located in Puerto Rico. She’s an astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “It’s a death in the family,” says Martha Haynes. On November 19, NSF announced it would begin taking apart this 305-meter (1,000 foot) ear on the sky. The earlier cable losses caused so much damage, however, that the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced its telescope could not be saved. This had already all but killed the telescope.įor 57 years, Arecibo had been picking up signals from space. Even before this happened, however, two important cables that were needed as support for that platform had failed. on December 1, a 900-ton instrument platform that was suspended above the large, light-gathering dish collapsed. Arecibo, the world’s second-largest radio telescope, has broken. ![]()
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