'I didn't have a lot of time to reflect on the loss of the thing and my own stresses,' Vanden Bout said. Vanden Bout said that meetings about the politics of a replacement consumed his days. (Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF)īyrd and Rockefeller both wanted to fight for the observatory's survival, and Byrd was a particularly powerful senator at the time. Both were fond of the observatory and felt it was an important economic and scientific asset for the state Seielstad said he showed Rockefeller around the wreckage within the days following the collapse.Īn image shows workers standing on a pathway built into the 300-ft dish to allow access to the telescope's receivers. Here, Green Bank had two key advocates: West Virginia's senators at the time, Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller. He remembers trying to cushion the blow by focusing on what would come next. 'It was kind of subtle until it was catastrophic.' 'When that one joint… gave way, then you weaken the next spot, and the next spot, the next one - it just sort of ripples 'til the whole thing collapses,' Seielstad said. Engineers inspected the wreckage and identified what was eventually determined to be the weak link. Then, it was time to investigate the failure. 'Some of it was under strain and it wasn't clear that it wouldn't snap loose.' 'The first thing was to secure the site, make sure people didn't poke around in the wreckage,' he said. (Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF)Īnd of course, he had to share the bad news with Vanden Bout, who remembers the initial focus on safety, an emphasis the NSF has cited in its response to the damage at Arecibo. The telescope collapsed into the building that housed its controls, but no one was injured. 'I could tell there's no use looking at this wreckage and assuming, 'Why don't we start repairing it?' There was no hope,' he said.

He said that in some ways, the situation he faced was straightforward. That's when Seielstad got the call he remembers so clearly. The telescope operator, working in the building below the dish, heard clattering as telescope debris fell into the building - far enough away that he could safely leave. that fateful night, when things fell apart. It was just that sort of research that the telescope was conducting at 9:43 p.m. Although the telescope could only tilt from north to south, combining that control with the movement of Earth below meant that astronomers could pan the sky, looking for sources of radio waves. In 1988 at Green Bank, the 300-foot dish was one of two telescopes at the observatory and spent most of its time conducting survey work. An image taken in 1961 shows the 300-foot telescope under construction.

Greenbank observatory