The investigation into why a cable mysteriously broke on the Arecibo Observatory has begun

space.com ^ | 14 August 2020 | Hanneke Weitering

[BenLurkin]

On Monday (Aug. 10), an auxiliary cable supporting a platform that is suspended above the 1,000-foot-wide (300 meters) radio dish broke and crashed into the telescope's reflector panels, creating a gash in the dish measuring about 100 feet (30 m) long.

In a news conference with reporters Friday (Aug. 14), Arecibo director Francisco Cordova said that 250 of the observatory's primary reflector dish panels were damaged, along with several support cables underneath the dish. But observatory officials have not yet fully assessed the extent of the damage or determined the cost of the repairs needed to get the 56-year-old radio telescope — once the largest single radio dish on Earth — back in action.

Cordova said that the auxiliary cable was designed to last at least another 15 to 20 years, so it's not clear why the cable failed. It was one of several auxiliary cables that were added to the observatory in the 1990s to help support a new addition to the telescope, called the Gregorian dome, which houses an antenna receiver on the platform.

No one was injured when the accident happened at approximately 2:45 a.m. EDT (0645 GMT) on Monday, as the facility was closed at the time.

The Arecibo Observatory has been shut down indefinitely until the telescope can be repaired. While the observatory is best known for its work in the search for life and potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, astronomers use it for a variety of space research and observations. Some of the work that has been put on hold until the telescope is fixed include studies of gravitational waves and pulsars, Cordova said.

[Redcitizen]

this thread is lacking something. Fixed it.

[BenLurkin]

Now that is a dish!

[Redcitizen]

Absolutely!