decommission

The US National Science Foundation has just announced it is going to begin decommissioning the famous Arecibo Observatory, the 1,000-foot-wide, 900-ton radio telescope located in Puerto Rico.

Since 2013, when regulators finally decided to shut SONGS down for good, teams of scientists, engineers, and policymakers have been hard at work to make sure it could be safely decommissioned.

In 2019, before it was decommissioned, I was in a group of 20 researchers who were given access to use it for calculations.

On Thursday night, two decommissioned spacecraft could collide, spraying dangerous space junk across the sky.