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 ARECIBO, Puerto Rico (AP) - Engineers will travel to this Puerto Rican coastal town in coming weeks to study whether to shut down the world's largest radio telescope, which was featured in the movie "Contact" but now faces steep budget cuts, observatory officials said Thursday.
Opened in 1963, the Arecibo telescope, a 1,000-foot-wide dish set in a sinkhole amid forested hills, bounces radio waves off asteroids and charts their location, speed and course. It has recorded a number of scientific discoveries, including the first planets beyond the solar system and lakes of hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon Titan.
But fears that it could face extinction began late last year, when a panel commissioned by the National Science Foundation, a U.S. federal agency, called for deep budget cuts and said officials should consider eliminating it entirely at the end of the decade.
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