![]() ![]() He describes it as looking like “an alien visitation” in a steamy landscape-an otherworldly apparition among the rainforested mountains. Seeing the telescope in person made it no less improbable, Dad says. “Hanging from what?” he recalls asking in his 1992 autobiography, Is Anyone Out There?, co-written with Dava Sobel. Cornell sent him to the Caribbean to check out the one-year-old telescope, an instrument that seemed blatantly improbable when Dad first heard it described-especially the instrument platform hanging 50 stories above the dish. In the early 1960s, Dad was best known for conducting Project Ozma, the first scientific search for communicating extraterrestrials, and for the Drake Equation, a formula that estimates how many alien civilizations are detectable in the Milky Way galaxy.Īfter a sojourn at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dad joined the faculty at Cornell University, which managed Arecibo. “The first time I visited Arecibo was in 1964,” says Frank Drake, my dad and a former observatory director. My parents love Puerto Rico, their window to the stars, and over the decades, they shared that love with their growing family. The observatory was potently symbolic, almost sacred, and it has been a part of my family history for more than half a century-a home for my father, and a cherished part of his work as an astronomer. ![]() Like the monuments and cathedrals that humans revere, Arecibo’s value transcended its utility. Each time I said goodbye to the telescope, I thought it would be waiting when I returned.įor many Puerto Ricans, astronomers, and space enthusiasts, Arecibo was more than a telescope. And I’ve watched as dusk washed over the Puerto Rican mountains, summoning the coquí tree frogs to sing their nightly chorus. I’ve seen the same kind of golden light that illuminated Arecibo the morning the telescope collapsed. It was news I’d been dreading, a story I did not want to write. He looked toward the towers, saw a cloud of dust and emptiness, and started screaming.Īnd I saw a tweet go by reporting that the Arecibo platform “ acaba de colapsar”-had just collapsed. Nearby, scientist Jonathan Friedman heard a terrible rumble and ran to the crest of a nearby hill. “My whole life has been at the observatory.” we started to see the eventual downfall of the observatory,” Vazquez said in a video posted on Twitter. ![]() “We heard a loud sound, a loud bang outside the control room, and. A catwalk to the platform disintegrated, sending metal and concrete raining down like grotesque confetti.įrom the observatory’s control room, Ángel Vázquez-chief of telescope operations and an observatory employee for more than 40 years-watched as the platform fell. The tops of the three support towers snapped off, sending concrete cascading into nearby ravines and parking lots, while plummeting cables lashed the dish and nearby buildings. The triangular platform swung violently into a rock face and sagged as it came to rest at the cliff’s base. When it fell, the thin-skinned dome smashed through the dish and crumpled. With an enormous roar, the floating platform slipped out of the morning sun and hurtled toward the shaded jungle floor. High above the dish, an enormous 900-ton platform held the equipment needed to focus those radio waves, including a dome filled with a complex reflector system-a structure large enough to engulf a four-story house.īut as the sky brightened on that lavender morning, a crucial cable suspending the platform ruptured-and then another broke, and then another. Its mammoth, 1,000-foot-wide dish made it exquisitely sensitive, able to capture radio waves that wash over Earth with just a millionth of the energy in a falling snowflake. Now, when the sun climbs over those mountains, it shines on the tangled ruins of a scientific and cultural treasure.įor nearly six decades, the Arecibo Observatory was Earth’s largest window to the cosmos. The skies blazed in shades of lilac and dusky rose, and the rising sun cast a warm glow on a giant radio telescope nestled among the karst mountains near the island’s northern shore. On the first day of December 2020, dawn in Puerto Rico was spectacular. ![]()
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