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The Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico lasted for 67 years, constructed over a sinkhole which housed its 1,000-foot-diameter collecting dish. Recently, it was announced that it would be dismantled because of failures in the structure, but it decided not to wait for its execution and collapsed yesterday. This image is from Sciencemag.org
Wikipedia link for more numerical facts etc
The telescope was used in the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, and scientific discoveries aided by the telescope include that Mercury spins faster than previously thought and has icy caps, and the discovery of the first binary pulsar. More at Forbes
This is how it used to look:
[img] (2248x1356:3104x2212):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/68042486/1229684803.0.jpg[/img]
that image is from The Verge
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Let's point fingers.
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It was me. I'm sorry.
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your Mama's so fat that..
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yebbut your Papa's so dumb that......
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Pretty sad. I heard on the radio that it was the preeminent science facility on the whole island. Tours by schoolchildren, etc. etc.
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I went to college with a guy from Puerto Rico, and shortly after I met him, he told me proudly of the observatory and asked if I knew of it. That was 1985, so it was only 32 years old then.
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I first heard of it in a number of sci-fi movies... it was always the observatory they picked to be the one to notice the aliens.
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This is a bummer.
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Video of the collapse