Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Volga bam here for fifty seven years. The air Cebo Observatory Radio and radar telescope facility, located about twelve miles or nineteen kilometers south of the city of air Cebo in Puerto Rico, was one of astronomy's
greatest treasures until recently. Air Cebo had the biggest radio telescope in the world, and its ability to detect distant signals made it one of the world's most powerful tools for studying both planets and moons in our own Solar system and mysterious objects in distant regions of the universe. Over the years, scientists used it to determine Mercury's rotation rate and map the surface of Venus, to discover the
first binary pulsar and the first known exoplanet. Air Cebo's researchers also made important findings about the properties and orbits
of asteroids that are potentially hazardous to Earth. Back in four air Cebo was even used to broadcast a radio message toward a globular star cluster twenty one thousand light years from Earth, filled with data that could potentially be deciphered by extraterrestrials to produce a simple illustration depicting a stick figure human, our solar system, DNA, and some of the biochemicals of early life. The message was designed by astronomer Frank Drake with the help of Carl Sagan and
other scientists. The telescope's deterioration became evident back in August when a support cable failed and slipped out of its dish, leaving a one hundred foot or thirty meter gash in the dish. Engineers worked to try to figure out how to repair the damage and determine the integrity of the structure, but then on November six, a main cable on the same tower broke, as well, a hint that other cables
might be weaker than initially believed. At that point, an engineering evaluation determined that it would be too risky even to do more repair work on the telescope. On November nineteenth, the National Science Foundation announced that the Observatories Radio Telescope would be discommissioned and dismantled, But before that could happen,
on December one, the instrument platform collapsed. This nine hundred ton instrument platform was suspended by cables attached to three towers at a height of four hundred and fifty feet that's about a hundred and forty above the telescope's massive radio telescope dish. It's one thousand feet or three hundred and fifty in diameter. The platform suddenly broke away from
its supports and fell. The National Science Foundation has authorized repairs to air sebos lied our instrument and a smaller telescope used for atmospheric science, but rebuilding air Sebos radio telescope would cost an estimated three hundred and fifty million dollars.
A National Science Foundation official indicated at a December third press conference that it could take years for the federal government to make a decision about whether to do that, but in the meanwhile, they said that the observatory would not close completely. In addition to operating the smaller dish and the lidar instrument, the visitors center would remain open.
The sudden and shocking apparent end of air Cebo's radio telescope caused an outpouring of remembrances on Twitter with the hashtag what air Cebo means to me, both from researchers who had used the telescope, and ordinary people who had visited the observatory and been inspired by it. People have chosen to get married there, and it was used as a setting in the James Bond movie Golden Eye and
sci fi drama Contact. Air Cebo was built back in nineteen sixty three at a cost of nine point three million dollars, which is close to eighty million in today's money. It came to exist due in large part to the efforts of Cornell University physicist William E. Gordon, who was
interested in studying the Earth's ionosphere. Gordon shows Puerto Rico for the site because the sun, moon, and planets passed almost to rerectly overhead, plus a natural synkhole south of the city of air Sebo provided a cost effective way to support his design of a spherical bowl shaped reflector planted in the ground with a movable receiver hanging over it. Pretty quickly, scientists realized the observatory would also be useful in the then new fields of radio and radar astronomy.
In nineteen sixty five, one of the observatory's first great accomplishments was to discover that the true rotation rate of Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun was just fifty nine days, not eight as had been previously estimated. In nine sixty eight, air SEBO scientists showed that sporadic radio pulses from the direction of the crab Nebulus supernova remnant came from a pulsar located at the center of the nebula. Other important
discoveries followed. In nineteen seventy four, air Sebo was used to discover the first pulsar in a binary system, which provided important confirmation for Albert einstein mines theory of general relativity, and for which the astronomers involved were awarded the Nobel Prize. In In the nine eighties and nineties, scientists used air
Cebo to make more discoveries about the Solar System. They used the telescope's radar to produce the first ever maps of the surface of the planet Venus, whose thick cloud layer had blocked optical telescopes view. They also found that despite Mercury's high surface temperature, the planet still has ice in shadowed craters at its north and south poles. In air cebo was instrumental and yet another monumentous first. The discovery of exoplanets, which are planets outside of our Solar
system orbiting around a pulsar. In two thousand three, air Sebo provided evidence for the existence of hydrocarbon lakes on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and in recent years, air Cebo has continued to gather important information, including helping to calculate distances that are important for understanding the universe. It's also produced radar images of Mars that revealed lava flows and other geological features that hadn't been detected in visual images
of the red planet. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Tiger and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other far seeing topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio or more podcasts. My heart Radio visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.