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Gone in seconds.

The world-famous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, known for helping scientists peer into deep space and listen for distant radio waves, is set to be decommissioned and demolished after engineers concluded that the facility’s structure is at risk of a collapse. While teams will try to salvage some parts of the observatory, the decommission will bring an end to the popular 57-year-old telescope, which has been featured in numerous films and television shows. The decision comes after two major cables failed at the facility within the last few months, causing significant damage to the observatory. The National Science Foundation (NSF),...

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...

The asteroid is called 52768 (1998 OR2), and it was first spotted in 1998. On April 29, it will pass within 3,908,791 miles of Earth, moving at 19,461 miles per hour. That's still 16 times farther than the distance between Earth and the moon. The flyby is expected to occur on Wednesday, April 29, at 5:56 a.m. ET, according to NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. The center tracks Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs, that could collide with Earth. Arecibo Observatory is a National Science Foundation facility managed by the University of Central Florida. A team of experts has been monitoring...

Astronomers will soon get another look at the big, ghoulishly weird space rock that buzzed Earth on Halloween three years ago. The roughly 2,100-foot-wide (640 meters) Halloween asteroid 2015 TB145 gave Earth a close shave on Oct. 31, 2015, coming within just 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers) of our planet. (For perspective, the moon orbits at an average distance of about 239,000 miles, or 384,600 km.) A Halloween flyby was quite appropriate, it turned out: Observations made at the time by a variety of instruments revealed that 2015 TB145 looks like an enormous skull, at least from some angles. ... The asteroid may...

The National Science Foundation has not heard from staff at the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria roared over the island. A spokeswoman for NSF, which owns the observatory, said the agency hadn't received any official communications from Arecibo since 8 a.m. Wednesday — before the eye of the storm passed over the telescope. Two of the groups that helps manage the observatory, SRI International and the Universities Space Research Association, also hadn't heard from their staff on site. One observatory staff member who weathered the storm in the town of Arecibo contacted the association via shortwave...