The reversal from fix-up to finish-off was a matter of safety, Ralph Gaume, director of NSF’s division of astronomical sciences, said in a telephone news conference. But in a 19 November statement, NASA said that those search efforts “are not impacted by the planned decommissioning of Arecibo’s 305m radio telescope.” The Arecibo Observatory was also a key part of NASA’s congressionally mandated planetary defense program to monitor near-Earth objects. And it featured in the films Contact and GoldenEye. The telescope was part of the NANOGrav project’s search for gravitational waves using pulsars (see Physics Today, July 2017, page 26). (China’s Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope began full operations this past January its effective aperture is the same as Arecibo’s at zenith, but it samples a narrower range of radio frequencies and does not include a radar transmitter.) Among the major discoveries at Arecibo were the first binary pulsar, the first exoplanet, and an ionized helium layer in the upper ionosphere. That decision closes the 57-year-old radio telescope, long the world’s largest eye on the sky. Courtesy of the Arecibo Observatory, a facility of the NSF Then, on 6 November, another cable snapped, precipitating an about-face: Arecibo’s owner, NSF, announced on 19 November that the telescope in Puerto Rico will be decommissioned. ![]() Studies were launched to understand why the cable failed, and a replacement cable was due to arrive in December. On 10 August a cable popped out of its socket and whipped down to gouge a huge hole in the 305-meter-diameter Arecibo radio telescope dish.
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