It’s been nearly four years since the Arecibo Telescope collapsed, an event the world got to witness in unprecedented detail thanks to strategically positioned drones. They captured breathtaking video of one of the support cables pulling from its socket as well as the spectacularly destructive results of 900 tons of scientific instruments crashing into the 300-meter primary reflector. But exactly why did those cable sockets fail?
A new report aims to answer that question, and in the process raises some interesting questions of its own. The proximate causes of the collapse have been known for a while, including the most obvious and visible one, the failure of the zinc “spelter sockets” that were cast around the splayed…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/zinc-creep-and-electroplasticity-why-arecibo-collapsed/