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A Broken Cable Has Smashed a Huge Hole in The Arecibo Observatory - ScienceAlert
Aug 12, 2020 39 secs

On Monday, a 3-inch-thick (76-mm-thick) cable at the Arecibo Observatory broke, tearing a gash 100 feet (30 metres) long in the reflector dish of the 20-acre radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

It was not immediately clear how the cable broke or whether the damage was related to Isaias.

But when a team at Arecibo trained the telescope at the asteroid to determine its shape and orbit, they discovered that it likely won't pass close enough to Earth to pose a threat in the future.

"Fortunately, the storm passed quickly without damage to the telescope or the radar system, and the maintenance and electronics teams were able to activate the telescope from hurricane lockdown in time for the observations," Sean Marshall, an observatory scientist who led the team doing those radar observations, said at the time

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