The organization also scoured years of the observatory’s data for patterns that may indicate intelligent life doing the same thing in reverse.Īrecibo’s crowning moment in pop culture, however, is certainly its appearance in the 1995 James Bond film “GoldenEye” - and the wildly popular Nintendo 64 game based on it. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence famously used the telescope to transmit a message at high power toward a nearby star cluster structured so that its artificial nature would be unmistakable, at least to any form of life remotely like our own. Signals coming through Arecibo helped inform our understanding of stellar objects from Mercury to distant pulsars. The enormous instrument boasted a larger size and different architecture than anything before it, opening up new possibilities for monitoring the universe (and transmitting to it, not something every array can do).Ĭountless researchers and projects used Arecibo, which as a federally funded resource was at least partly dedicated to public proposals. The enormous observatory was completed in 1963 and immediately established itself as a powerful tool for astronomers and atmospheric scientists around the world. The famous Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, which has provided an invaluable service to scientists for 57 years as well as establishing itself in popular culture, will be dismantled after it incurred irreparable damage in recent months. Update: The telescope has collapsed, the suspended platform falling through the remainder of the dish.

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