The iconic Arecibo Radio Telescope, with a 1,000-foot diameter spherical reflecting dish built into a mountaintop in Puerto Rico, suffered an unplanned collapse of its receiver platform overnight after a second cable failed in four months, Space.com reports.  No one was injured in the accident.

The cable system supported and steered the platform, 150 feet above the collection dish, to focus the telescope to look deep into space.  Another cable had failed four months ago, prompting the US National Science Foundation, which runs the facility, to decommission the telescope because it was too dangerous to repair.  The USNSF planned to deconstruct the telescope in a controlled manner, but the collapse of the platform made that effort moot.

The telescope first went online November 1, 1963.  It helped to discover various pulsars, supernovae and other interstellar objects, as well as help scientific understanding of our own solar system.  Soon after going online, scientists used the Arecibo telescope to learn that a “day” on Mercury wasn’t 88 days, as thought, but 59 days. 

Arecibo also played a role in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, searching for signals from space.  Another project, METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence), used the site to beam a signal to the globular cluster known as Messier 13, 25,000 light years away.

The site was used as the setting for such movies as Contact, Golden Eye and Species, as well as the television show The X-Files.