Arecibo comes down

The 900-tonne instrument platform slung above the Arecibo dish tore loose and fell into it, forty-six years after the telescope had beamed a message at the stars.

Two support cables had already failed that year and the decision to decommission had been taken a fortnight earlier; it collapsed before anyone could dismantle it safely. Arecibo had found the first pulsar in a binary system, the first exoplanets anywhere, and mapped thousands of near-Earth asteroids by radar.