Big Dish

Sorry to see this in the Guardian:

Operations at the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico, one of the largest in the world, were halted in August when one of its supportive cables slipped loose from its socket, falling and gashing a 30-metre (100ft) hole in its 305m-wide (1,000ft) reflector dish.

And;

Another cable then broke earlier this month, tearing a new hole in the dish and damaging nearby cables as engineers scrambled to devise a plan to preserve the crippled structure.

The National Science Foundation decided that it was impractical to fix the site. That decision will see the end of the telescope, after 57 odd years, but apparently other parts of the observatory will continue to function there.

Some will recognise it from the films Contact and Goldeneye. But it also served as a setting, for an X-Files episode, ‘Little Green Men’, though that wasn’t actually filmed there.