From the Bits of Universe archive — 01/12/2020

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided today that a gradual closure of the Arecibo observatory, for years the largest radio telescope in the world with its 305m in diameter, will be initiated on the island of Puerto Rico.
A painful but inevitable decision: the National Science Foundation, which manages the facility, has been adamant. The radio telescope is too damaged and there is no way to safely repair it. It will be dismantled.
This is only the conclusion of a long saga of doom. The Arecibo radio telescope was built 57 years ago, and with its 305 meters in diameter it was the largest in the world for over 50 years. In 2017, the structure suffered heavy damage from Hurricane Maria, one of the most destructive to hit the island of Puerto Rico. This summer, in August, an auxiliary cable snapped, falling on the telescope’s disc and damaging it further.
The structure was subjected to inspections to determine its condition and repairability, but in October another cable, this time a main one and also considered relatively healthy, broke, ruining the disc and damaging it even more.
The result of the inspections came today, with the decision by the National Science Foundation to decommission the facility. Almost all cables show wear and corrosion too advanced, some of the towers supporting the central platform could collapse without warning on the surrounding structures. And once a crumbling structure begins to collapse there is no way to stop the process. Breaking another cable would increase the load on the remaining cables, already damaged by age, even more, and this could cause a domino effect with the uncontrolled destruction of the entire telescope.
And therefore Arecibo will be dismantled, in the most controlled way possible and “accompanying” what is the now inevitable complete collapse of the structure.
Arecibo is famous for his role in the film Contact, and in the SETI project commissioned by Carl Sagan.
The demolition of Arecibo will leave a great void in all radio astronomy enthusiasts and in scientific research in general.

UPDATE 1/12/2020
As foreseen by the NSF engineers, the main telescope structure collapsed due to the breakage of additional support cables. You can see the video on the right