The National Science Foundation reported Thursday that it will close the immense telescope at the prestigious Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in a hit to researchers overall who rely upon it to look for planets, space rocks, and extraterrestrial life.
The free, governmentally supported office said it’s too risky to even consider continuing to work the single-dish radio telescope – one of the world’s biggest – given the critical harm it as of late maintained. A helper link broke in August and tore a 100-foot opening in the reflector dish and harmed the vault above it. At that point on Nov. 6, one of the telescope’s primary steel links snapped, making further harm and driving authorities to caution that the whole construction could fall.
The telescope flaunts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish included in the Jodie Foster film “Contact” and the James Bond film “GoldenEye” and had been working for a very long time. Researchers worldwide have utilized it to follow space rocks on a way to Earth, direct exploration that prompted a Nobel Prize and decide whether a planet is conceivably livable.
