The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that the world-renowned Arecibo Observatory, in the US territory of Puerto Rico, is to be decommissioned after 57 years of operation. The decommissioning is the result of structural weaknesses that have been discovered after a support cable broke in August. For 53 years, the fixed Arecibo radio astronomy dish was, with a diameter of 305 m, the largest single-aperture telescope in the world. It was only eclipsed in mid-2016 when China’s 500 m (diameter) Aperture Spherical Telescope was commissioned. Currently managed by the University of Central Florida (UCF), the Arecibo dish is located in a natural hollow. Its dish is spherical, not parabolic, and a 900 t instrument platform is suspended some 137 m above it, by cables connected to three towers. The instrument platform gave the telescope a limited ability to steer radio beams, allowing the telescope to cover a 40 ˚ arc of the sky above it.
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