I woke up today to the news that the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, originally constructed in 1963, had collapsed. This wasn't entirely a surprise (though it was a shock), as it had been having some trouble lately. Back in August, one of the cables holding the instrument platform above the dish snapped, followed by a second one in November. After the second cable broke, the NSF decided about a week ago to decommission the telescope after determining it would be too dangerous to repair it. That decision turns out to have been the right call, as today another cable snapped (along with the tops of the towers they were anchored to), sending the many-ton instrument platform plunging to the ground and through the dish in between.
Now, I've never used Arecibo myself, but pretty much every astronomer knows about it; for being the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world until 2015, and for participating in various important scientific work over the years. Plenty of non-astronomers know about it too due to its appearance in movies such as Goldeneye. Its loss will leave a gap in astronomy for quite a while, unfortunately; for instance, it's been used to bounce radar off of near-earth asteroids to give us a better idea of their shapes and orbits, which can help determine their threat levels. All in all, it's a bit of an end of an era for radio astronomy. (This doesn't affect me or my PhD at all, if you were wondering, but it's still a shame it happened.)
Edit (12/6/20): The NSF released a video of the collapse, which was, remarkably, caught by two sources: a security camera trained on the telescope, and a drone which happened to be inspecting one of the cables at the exact moment it snapped. It's pretty heartrending to watch, but also pretty incredible to have it caught on camera like that.
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