Cable failures put giant radio telescope at risk
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Giant, aging cables that support one of the world’s largest single-dish radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, pushing an observatory renowned for its key role in astronomical discoveries to the brink of collapse.
The Arecibo Observatory, tethered above a sinkhole in Puerto Rico’s mountain region, boasts a 1,000foot-wide dish featured in the Jodie Foster film “Contact” and the James Bond movie “GoldenEye.”
The dish and a dome suspended above it have been used to track asteroids headed to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and helped scientists trying to determine if a planet is habitable.
“As someone who depends on Arecibo for my science, I’m frightened. It’s a very worrisome situation right now. There’s a possibility of cascading, catastrophic failure,” said astronomer Scott Ransom with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, a collaboration of scientists in the U.S. and Canada.
This month, one of the telescope’s main steel cables that was capable of sustaining 1,200 pounds snapped under only 624 pounds.
That failure further mangled the reflector dish after an auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot hole and damaging the dome above it.
Officials said they were surprised because they had evaluated the structure in August and believed it could handle the shift in weight based on other inspections.
The telescope was built in the 1960s and financed by the Defense Department amid a push to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses.
Damage is estimated at more than $12 million, and the observatory is seeking money from the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that owns the facility.