See the unreal drone footage of the catastrophic fall of the Arecibo Observatory

The National Science Foundation released amazing video footage on Thursday Arecibo Observatory dropped 900 tons of platform Into a 1,000-foot-wide dish below. While a drone is doing a close investigation of the cables, the cables had a platform on top of the dish as it snapped on Tuesday.

Video of the massive radio telescope shows both drone footage and a scene from a camera in the visitor center, which shows him falling into a platform dish on a jungle floor in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Two large sections of cement towers to which the cables are attached can also be seen falling.

Two cables were broken in the past, one in August and the other Another in November, Destabilizes the telescope.

A drone was inspecting the site on one of the towers, where one of the previous cable breaks had occurred and the rest had suddenly fallen.

The NSF recently decided to decommission the telescope after the second cable broke in November.

“This is a dangerous situation,” John Abruzzo, an engineering consulting firm with Thornton Tomashetti, the NSF contractor, told reporters on Thursday. “Those cables would never fail.”

On Tuesday, they did.

The NSF reported that no one was injured in the crash, with only minor damage to the visitor center.

The telescope, which has been in operation for nearly 60 years, is the setting for a dramatic fight scene in the 1995 James Bond film The golden eye With Pierce Brosnan. It also appeared in the 1997 Jodi Foster movie Contact. But there is a real legacy of Arecibo Many scientific discoveries It was possible. It explored pulsars, expanded our knowledge of Mercury, spotted spotted planets and rapid radio explosions.