The Head of Scientific Operations of the Arecibo Observatory, Christiano Brum, announced that the new structure that will be erected in place will be “state of the art” and “stronger and more sensitive” than the one that collapsed in December last year.
“Here at Arecibo Observatory, we continue to work hard to continue Arecibo’s legacy, with a new next-generation observatory that would be even stronger and more sensitive,” he said.
The 305-meter telescope crashed on December 1, 2020, following a series of broken cables that suspended the 900-ton platform above the radio telescope’s receiving antenna.
Built in 1963, the telescope was the largest single-antenna radio telescope in the world until the FAST telescope began operating in China in 2016.
At the time of its collapse, the Arecibo telescope was still known as the most sensitive and powerful radar telescope in the world and was making revolutionary scientific discoveries about our atmosphere, the cosmos and tracking the record number of asteroids near Earth.