Arecibo Observatory’s Chief of Scientific Operations, Christiano Brum, announced that the new structure to be erected in its place will be “of the latest generation” and “more powerful and sensitive” than the one that collapsed last December.
“Here at the Arecibo Observatory, we continue to work hard to continue the Arecibo legacy, with a new next-generation observatory that would be even more powerful and sensitive,” he said.
The 305-meter telescope collapsed on December 1, 2020 after a series of broken cables that suspended the 900-tonne platform above the radio telescope’s receiving dish.
Built in 1963, the telescope was the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope until the FAST telescope was deployed 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, making groundbreaking scientific discoveries about our atmosphere, the cosmos and the tracking of record numbers of near-terrestrial asteroids.