Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/03/watch-drone-footage-of-arecibo-collapse.html
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Jet fuel doesn’t burn that hot, that was a controlled demolition.
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Clearly the result of a Butterfly Effect started by the drone’s propwash.
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“The National Science Foundation released a video that shows the 60-year-old Arecibo Radio Observatory’s collapse.”
The sad thing is, she was only three days from Retirement.
The first half of the video had me thinking…
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I’m not saying it was aliens…(but it was aliens)
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wow, that was just sadder than I expected…in other news, there’s now a monolith in the snows of Manitoba and it has “alien” writing on it…
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All kidding aside, I’ll bet SFX people will be using the images and audio as references for future projects.
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How unlikely and fortunate that the drone was staring at the failure point as it failed.
It’s quite a big loss for the astronomy community.
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Probably not that unlikely since the thing was in the process of failing and the drone was inspecting the weakest point at the time. The drone operator was clearly not prepared and missed most of the excitement because it took too long for him to turn around.
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Those are getting around these days
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I’ve used this telescope for almost 20 years — starting in 2001, when I first visited as a PhD student. We used it to discover the first repeating “fast radio burst” (Spitler et al. 2016, Nature, 531, 202) and many other amazing things. It’s heartbreaking to watch it collapse. It was still making groundbreaking discoveries.
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Holy crap, that was indeed sad, but amazing! I can’t believe they actually got that footage
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Very likely that they were inspecting it given its condition, unlikely that they were there with a drone at the exact moment it happened. It is like the pitch-drop experiment. It was caught on camera, but a researcher missed seeing it happen with his own eyes by a minute of two.
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Always a pleasure watching millions of taxpayer dollars being flushed down the toilet.
According to the article they’ve had the thing under near constant drone surveillance since the last cable broke and it was discovered that threads in the remaining cable were snapping. The people on site (a safe distance away) knew it was going to fail soon.
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I wish they’d been able to stay focussed on the tower top until it failed completely. There was another drone getting the big view and close up footage of the complete failure at the tower top would have provided even more data. As it is I think engineers are going to be going over this footage frame by frame for a long time.
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I don’t think it’s a big mystery why this one failed. Having a drone looking directly at the first failure point (well, the third, but this was the fatal one) at the time of failure should make it an open and shut case.
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There’s probably still things for engineers learn from being able see a failure like this close up. It’s not something you can easily test in real life and simulations assume you have all the parameters correct. 
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