About three years after the event, a neutron scan by Oak Ridge National Laboratory revealed the cause of the platform’s collapse, which destroyed the Arecibo Observatory’s 300-foot (300-meter) radio telescope.
Built in 1963, the Arecibo radio telescope is built into a natural funnel with a 1.8 million lb (816,000 kg) steel platform suspended from a focal point 500 ft (150 m) above a mesh dish. He conducted the latest astronomical research for over 50 years, sending one of the first messages into space to connect with alien civilizations, culminating in the 1995 Bond thriller. “Golden Eye”.
Then on December 1, 2020, it all came to an end when the support cables suddenly slipped and the huge platform crashed into the platter – thankfully no casualties were reported. After careful inspection it was determined that the damage was so great and repairs would be so expensive that it was decided to scrap the telescope.
But the question of exactly what happened remained open, and Arecibo’s operator, the University of Central Florida and the National Science Foundation, commissioned forensic firm Thornton Tomasetti to investigate the cause of the dramatic accident.
As part of this effort, Adrian Brugger, director of Columbia University’s Robert AW Carleton Materials Strength Laboratory, took entire sections of failed cable outlets, along with cables and outlet liners, and subjected them to neutron scanning at the Oak Ridge High Flux Isotope Reactor. (HFIR).
Neutron scanning is widely used in a number of applications due to its high penetrating power and because neutrons interact with matter differently than conventional X-rays. Where X-rays are weakened by the density of the material they pass through, the neutrons interact non-destructively with the matter and scatter, allowing for detailed imaging of the bank vault lock and the frog’s musculature.
The video below shows the fall of the Arecibo telescope.
In the Arecibo case, the scans allowed Brugger to take cross-sectional images of the cable outlets and identify which wires had slipped by how much, even if they were still embedded in the zinc brace. What was evident was that the cables were starting to fray as they were subjected to the stress of supporting the platform. This led to the leakage of zinc under voltage. Then the zinc leaked so much that the sockets failed and the wires broke completely.
It cannot be determined exactly how much of this shift occurred before or during the event. All that is known is that two cables failed before it collapsed and a third failure caused the platform to fall.
Source: Port Altele
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