![]() “Until these assessments came in, our question was not if the observatory should be repaired but how,” Ralph Gaume, director of the astronomy division of the National Science Foundation, told the New York Times on Thursday. “Any attempts at repairs could put workers in potentially life-threatening danger.” As such, the NSF announced on Thursday that it will be dismantling the array before it can come crashing down on its own. “The telescope is in danger of catastrophic failure,” the NSF wrote in a November statement. The situation has grown so dangerous that the National Science Foundation had serious doubts as to whether it could be repaired without putting lives in danger during the repair process. That damage alone was enough to knock the observatory offline for months, however a second cable front the same tower subsequently snapped in November, further damaging the array and putting it in danger of an uncontrolled collapse. At the time, the University of Florida, which runs the facility on behalf of the National Science Foundation, deployed three different engineering teams to investigate the problem. The venerable space observatory has been out of commission since August when a cable atop Tower 4, which supports the platform, snapped and gutted a 100-foot long section from the telescope’s reflecting dish. ![]() Structural engineers and repair crews have done all that they can but the end result is as we feared: the Arecibo radio telescope has to come down.
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