Management Update (August 11, 2020) by Director Eng. Francisco Cordova

Management

August 11, 2020

We have unfortunate news to share with the AO community. Early yesterday morning one of the auxiliary cables at tower 4 of the Arecibo Observatory experienced a failure.
Fortunately, there were no resulting injuries to our team. The cable failure damaged 250 panels of the primary dish, as well as 6-8 panels on the Gregorian Dome.
The telescope is currently undergoing inspections so that the following tasks can be accomplished:

* Safely remove debris, preventing them from causing more damage
* Position the Gregorian dome in a structurally stable (stow) position
* Develop a plan for damage repair

There will be no observations at the Arecibo Observatory for at least two weeks.
As soon as we have completed our initial assessment, we will share more details regarding the cable failure and our plans going forward to address this issue.
We thank the AO community for their support at this time.


Thanks,
Francisco Cordova
Director - Arecibo Observatory
University of Central Florida

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Arecibo Media Contact Ricardo Correa Universidad Ana G. Méndez (UAGM) 787-878-2612 ext. 615 rcorrea@naic.edu

Keywords: arecibo, observatory, management, update, repairs, cable, replacement,