Repairs from Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, were still underway when the first cable snapped. It's endured over a half-century of disasters, including hurricanes and earthquakes. The telescope was built in the 1960s and financed by the Defense Department amid a push to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses. Research has been suspended since August, including a project aiding scientists in their search for nearby galaxies. The facility is also one of Puerto Rico's main tourist attractions, drawing some 90,000 visitors a year. It's a blow for the telescope that more than 250 scientists around the world were using. Officials said they were surprised because they had evaluated the structure in August and believed it could handle the shift in weight based on previous inspections. That failure further mangled the reflector dish after an auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot hole and damaging the dome above it. Last week, one of the telescope's main steel cables that was capable of sustaining 1.2 million pounds (544,000 kilograms) snapped under only 624,000 pounds (283,000 kilograms). There's a possibility of cascading, catastrophic failure," said astronomer Scott Ransom with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, a collaboration of scientists in the U.S. It's a very worrisome situation right now. "As someone who depends on Arecibo for my science, I'm frightened. The Arecibo Observatory, which is tethered above a sinkhole in Puerto Rico's lush mountain region, boasts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film "Contact" and the James Bond movie "GoldenEye." The dish and a dome suspended above it have been used to track asteroids headed toward Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and helped scientists trying to determine if a planet is habitable.
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