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“This video, that starts with a view of the top of Tower 4, was taken from the vantage point of an Arecibo Observatory drone, utilized for monitoring the condition of Tower 4 support cables.” More: Video Of The Collapse Of the Arecibo Observatory
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
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Depressing footage. How was the drone zoomed in on the critical support at the exact time of the failure? Were there any signs (sounds) of an impending failure?
The timing of the drone’s proximity to the point of failure has me scratching my head about potential connections. Was the drone there because they suspected that something was going on right then? Did the drone’s presence somehow precipitate the failure?
If you look closely at the beginning of the drone footage you will see that a couple of the stands of the cable that failed were already broken. That indicates a possible impeding failure.
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See the NSF webpage on the failure for the source video, the media briefing, engineering status reports, etc.
The briefing addresses the questions of how the videos happened to be taken. Short form is “lucky that planned monitoring happened to capture it”. The other obvious questions are asked and responded to – if not answered definitively 🙁