![]() In addition to its importance to the scientific community, the observatory was also a symbol in popular culture and in Puerto Rico, attracting 90,000 tourists per year and appearing on film in 1997’s Contact and the James Bond film Goldeneye. For more than half a century, the enormous Arecibo telescope searched the skies from its spot in a lush forest of Puerto Rico. Built into a natural limestone sinkhole, the telescope is. ![]() The telescope consisted of a 1,000-foot-wide radio dish below a suspended 900-ton instrument platform, which was what collapsed Tuesday after being suspended 450 feet in the air by cables connected to three towers. Arecibo has also been used for decades in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SN: 11/7/92), and it beamed the first radio message to aliens into space in 1974 (SN: 11/23/74). ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: An historic telescope has collapsed. At 1,000 feet (305 meters) across and 167 feet deep, the Arecibo telescope is the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world. The observatory was also involved in the search for extraterrestrial life. Most famous for its appearance in the 1995 James Bond GoldenEye movie, its also known for detecting an alien radio signal in the 1997 film Contact. Key BackgroundĪrecibo had been involved in a vast array of scientific research throughout its 57-year history, including helping to discover the first binary pulsar star, which led to a Nobel Prize, and the first exoplanets that lie beyond the Solar System. The NSF announced at the time that some operations at the observatory would reopen, including its visitor center and some offsite research and data analysis, and it is currently unknown whether those activities will be impacted by the collapse.
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