As Hurricane Maria approached Puerto Rico in late September 2017, planetary scientist Ed Rivera-Valentin knew he needed to get out. His apartment was near the coast, in Manatí, and some projections had the storm passing directly over. “I knew I couldn’t stay there because something bad was going to happen,” he says.

Some people stayed with inland family or in shelters. But Rivera-Valentin went to work, driving an hour or so into the island's karst formations, the knobby, tree-covered hills left as water dissolves limestone. Between the peaks sits Arecibo Observatory, the 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope where scientists have, since 1963, studied things up above. Rivera-Valentin grew up in the city of Arecibo, and as an adult, the telescope became his professional home: He got his dream job using Arecibo's radar to study asteroids. As the hurricane approached, he also thought perhaps the observatory could be his bunker.

The telescope, though, was soon to meet with unusually strong forces of nature. Like the island itself—which was hit with some $90 billion of damage, hundreds or thousands of deaths, and infrastructural failings—the observatory took a beating from Hurricane Maria. Eight months later, with recovery money from the federal government newly available, Arecibo is just beginning to bounce back. While the hurricane didn't knock Arecibo out, it did leave the telescope a fraction as effective as it once was. And it did so at the same time that the telescope faces decreased funding from the National Science Foundation and a disruptive change in management.

Rivera-Valentin wasn't the only employee who had decided to retreat to the telescope. At the observatory, most of the employee-evacuees hunkered down in the visiting scientists’ quarters, meant for out-of-town astronomers, and the cafeteria. But Rivera-Valentin stayed in his office. As water seeped through every gap it could find, he put himself on mopping duty. Inside the control room and engineering building, where the main corridor was flooding, another scientist—Phil Perillat—protected the electronics.

As the calm eye of the storm passed over, Perillat snapped a photo of the telescope’s “line feed”—a 96-foot-long radio receiver that looks like a lightning rod. It hangs 500 feet above the dish, pointed toward the ground. You might remember it from Golden Eye, when James Bond dangles from the rod in an adrenaline-filled chase scene. But in Perillat's picture, the line feed itself is dangling. It had snapped in the wind, which reached 110 miles per hour at the observatory site.

At some point, Rivera-Valentin heard a boom: The dangling line feed, he would later learn, had completely detached, falling hundreds of feet onto the dish and smashing through its surface panels like a meteorite.

After the storm had passed, on September 21, people were stuck at the observatory for days. The two roads leading down from the site were blocked by trees, landslides, and even a newly-formed lake. But observatories, in general, are meant to keep up operations when the grid goes down. They have generators, water. Angel Vazquez, director of telescope operations, was able to contact the outside world with his HAM radio, and let them know everyone was OK.

The radio telescope, however, was not. When employees first attempted to assess the damage, they went to the visitors’ center, where an observation platform overlooks the dish. They couldn’t get as up close as they usually could, by walking underneath it: An eight-foot-deep lake—which lingered till December—now lapped against the telescope’s undergirdle. Eventually, they paddled beneath the massive structure in kayaks, and saw damaged panels hanging below the surface, looking like roof metal twisted in a tornado.