Arecibo Observatory is No More

Science, Engineering, & Tech
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Kind of sad day…

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I guess you could say their research came to a ground breaking conclusion.

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Like all things that are underfunded for maintenence and upkeep it all breaks down…
can we say bridges?

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F.

No Sean Beans were harmed in the unplanned rapid deconstruction of this facility…

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They found alien signals and now they’re covering it up. Where is agent Mulder when you need him?

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This was always a place on my bucket list that I wanted to visit. Just like some of the stars that we lost in the 20 teens, I will never be able to fulfill that wish.

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F to Arecibo

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The facility will remain active with other buildings and years of data to process but the dish will be gone or in an advanced state of deconstruction. So can still go, but won’t be as impressive now.

Maybe they could put an AR thing in so you could into at what was even though it is an open space now. Or even low tech clear screens with the setup impose on it so you can look through and see what was along with various facts, like the part that crashed down was 900tons.

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I think that is a very innovative approach. Never thought about that.

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There is nothing indicating that.

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There were several posts in the news stating just that. The funding needed to keep the upkeep and replace the cables that were weakening were more than the allocated monies for maintainence. Additional funding would have to go thru Congress for approval. But that never happened.

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This is what happens when Sean Bean dies on your location.

Valar Morghulis

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I feel like I’ve seen this before… in Battlefield 4 :thinking:

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I was heard about this earlier, and here is some of the footage I was looking at:

Official NSF “Footage of Arecibo Observatory collapse”

uses the collapse section of Perez’s video below, along with inspection drone footage of cables failing on Tower 4

Carlos Perez video “… Last Dawn …”

32× timelapse of the hours leading up to collapse, including collapse at normal speed

Scott Manely video “Analyzing Video Footage…”

Footage from the Arecibo platform

while reading about this, I wanted to find footage of what it was like on the suspended platform, and found these three videos of tours of the facility:

Edit: adding crosslink for news dump thread

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They are already preparing a replacement project for Arecibo. It should be an array of 1000 (?) Steerable telescopes with a diameter of 9 meters.
The advantages of this concept include the possibility of doubling the sensitivity of the radio telescope and increasing the sky coverage by 250%.

This new concept can find application not only in astronomy and planetary science. One potential application is situational awareness in space.

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If a Sean Bean character will not die there, why even bother at this point?

All jokes aside, a nicer replacement telescope is always good to have.

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Oh so that’s where my fave tf2 map is located