Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suffers serious damage after cable breaks

The iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has gone dark, at least for a little while.

One of the telescope's supporting cables snapped early Monday morning (Aug. 10), ripping a 100-foot-long (30 meters) gash in the giant radio dish, according to the University of Central Florida (UCF). The observatory has been shut down while engineers assess the damage and formulate a fix.

"We have a team of experts assessing the situation," Arecibo director Francisco Cordova said in a UCF Today statement. "Our focus is assuring the safety of our staff, protecting the facilities and equipment and restoring the facility to full operations as soon as possible, so it can continue to assist scientists around the world."

The iconic Arecibo Observatory's giant radio telescope dish suffered serious damage on Aug. 10, 2020 when a support cable broke. (Image credit: University of Central Florida)

The 1,000-foot-wide (300 m) Arecibo got up and running in 1963. It was the world's largest single-dish radio telescope until 2016, when China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope claimed the mantle.

Arecibo has done a wide variety of work during its long life, from tracking and imaging near-Earth asteroids to listening for possible signals from advanced alien civilizations. And its communication attempts have not all been one-way: In 1974, scientists used the observatory to beam the pictorial "Arecibo Message" toward M13, a globular cluster that lies 25,000 light-years from Earth.

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