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Arecibo Radio Telescope suffers catastrophic collapse.
12-01-2020, 04:55 PM
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
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RE: Arecibo Radio Telescope suffers catastrophic collapse.
12-01-2020, 06:14 PM
To be fair, from the assessments that they did when the one main cable failed, it's not surprising that it collapsed. And it definitely says it was a good idea that they looked to decommission rather than try to fix it; if they'd managed to get to starting repair work it would have fallen even sooner, I expect.
Anyone who was petitioning to save it even in light of engineers going, "it's not safe at all to repair it," is an idiot, even though the loss of the whole thing is sad and was avoidable.
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
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RE: Arecibo Radio Telescope suffers catastrophic collapse.
12-01-2020, 07:52 PM
Eh, multiple ways to interpret 'saving the radio telescope'. Dismantling it, salvaging what can be salvaged and rebuilding it saves the radio telescope's mission capabilities, for example.
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RE: Arecibo Radio Telescope suffers catastrophic collapse.
12-03-2020, 03:29 PM
Now with video.
Look at it go!
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.
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RE: Arecibo Radio Telescope suffers catastrophic collapse.
12-03-2020, 05:53 PM
I watched Scott Manley's video about the collapse (before this video came out), and he was pretty much spot on about the sequence of events. One of the remaining cables let go, and the resulting shift of weight distribution finished off the remaining cables on that side one after another as the shifting caused the load to exceed their maximum capacity, and the dome even fell off during the initial swing.
In the up close drone footage at Tower 4... as the second cable starts to give, you watch all the paint strip right off the cable, leaving the steel completely exposed.
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
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RE: Arecibo Radio Telescope suffers catastrophic collapse.
12-04-2020, 02:48 PM
I never had a chance to visit the Observatory and now I'll never be able to.
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
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RE: Arecibo Radio Telescope suffers catastrophic collapse.
12-04-2020, 10:44 PM
SciShow makes a farewell video to Arecibo’s Telescope
https://youtu.be/qs6JHLQG_RY
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
