Arecibo
An image of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico taken by a SkySat satellite Aug. 10 shows the hole in the telescope's dish caused by a cable that broke earlier that day.

The NSF announced Nov. 19 it will perform a “controlled decommissioning” of the giant radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, citing recent damage that made it unsafe to operate or even repair.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...