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After the collapse of what was once the world's largest radio telescope in Puerto Rico, experts are currently transferring huge amounts of astronomical measurement data to the US mainland.
The Arecibo telescope has been used to observe the universe since the 1960s.
On August 10 and November 6, 2020, broken steel cables of the platform suspension severely damaged the telescopic reflector.
On December 1, 2020, more ropes failed and the 900-ton instrument platform fell 137 meters onto the reflector, which led to the destruction of the telescope.
Nobody was injured.
Now three petabytes of data from several decades are to be stored on a server farm at the University of Texas in Austin.
Hundreds of discoveries in 50 years
The hope is that astronomers will continue to dig through the mountains of data even after the telescope has been switched off.
"Arecibo data has led to hundreds of discoveries in the past 50 years," says Francisco Córdova, director of the telescope facility.
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With the saved data one has the possibility to make even more discoveries and to understand recently discovered physical phenomena.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence could also help here.
The radio telescope in Puerto Rico was the largest radio telescope in the world with a diameter of 305 meters until 2016, when an even larger one went into operation in China.
The complex was a popular tourist attraction - also because it was used as a backdrop in the 1995 James Bond film "GoldenEye".
In 2020, the radio telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed.
Source: picture alliance / ZUMAPRESS.com
The telescope was put into operation in 1963.
In 1974 the US astronomers Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor discovered with him the double pulsar PSR 1913 + 16 - two orbiting neutron stars - and indirectly observed gravitational waves with it.
Radar data from the surface of Venus
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In 1993, Hulse and Taylor received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this.
With the help of the Arecibo telescope, the first radar maps of the surface of Venus were created and ice was discovered at the north pole of Mercury.
The telescope was also involved in the discovery of planets outside our solar system.
Radio telescopes receive electromagnetic waves coming from space in the frequency range of radio waves.
These data are processed in computers and can then be displayed, for example, in the form of maps and images.
In order for the data transfer from Arecibo to Texas to work, the University of Puerto Rico and a coworking provider provide their Internet infrastructure, the university announced.
The transfer started in mid-January 2021 and will be carried out in several steps.