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Arecibo telescope collapses, ending 57-year run

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www.sciencemag.org

Eric HandThe Arecibo Observatory is gone. Its 900-ton instrument platform, suspended above a dish in the karst hills of Puerto Rico, collapsed this morning, at about 8 a.m.

local time, says Ramon Lugo, director of the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida, which manages the 57-year-old radio telescope for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

On 19 November, NSF decided to decommission the observatory following two cable breaks that put the platform on the brink of collapse.

But in the end, it couldn’t survive long enough for a controlled demolition.“I feel sick in my stomach,” Lugo says, fighting back tears. “Truthfully, it was a lot of hard work by a lot of people trying to restore this facility.

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