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Priceless Astronomy Data Saved After Collapse of Arecibo Telescope
AUSTIN, Texas – When Puerto Rico’s famed Arecibo telescope collapsed in 2020, astronomers lost access to one of the world’s most treasured pieces of equipment – but also, potentially, decades of priceless data holding still undiscovered secrets about the universe. Now, thanks to a data rescue plan led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin, Arecibo’s observations will be preserved for generations of future astronomers.
Millions of people have seen footage of the collapse in December 2020 of the famed Arecibo radio telescope. The 900-ton spidery-looking instrument platform snapped its gossamer-like suspension cables, which sent it crashing through the radio dish below and into the Puerto Rican countryside, destroying the giant telescope.
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IMAGE: TACC s Ranch supercomputer, a long-term data mass storage system, is safely preserving over three petabytes of data from the Arecibo radio telescope. Ranch is an allocated resource of the Extreme. view more
Credit: TACC
Millions of people have seen footage of the famed Arecibo radio telescope s collapse in December 2020. What they would not have seen from those videos was Arecibo s data center, located outside the danger zone. It stores the golden copy of the telescope s data the original tapes, hard drives, and disk drives of sky scans since the 1960s.
Now, a new partnership will make sure that about three petabytes, or 3,000 terabytes, of telescope data is securely backed up off-site and made accessible to astronomers around the world, who will be able to use it to continue Arecibo Observatory s legacy of discovery and innovation.