Green bank telescope9/7/2023 ![]() Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ferruccio Manfieri, who writes: Nineteen smaller ones will sit close to the center, and 30 18-meterers will constellate the continent.Ĭheck out this video for more info about the ngVLA: The primary array will have 214 18-meter antennas, spiraled across New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and Mexico. As currently envisioned, the ngVLA’s many antennas will together have 10 times the sensitivity and resolution as the VLA, at a wider range of frequencies. THERE IS A new facility potentially on the horizon: The Next-Generation VLA (the VLA itself, while upgraded, is 40 years old). And no matter what it is, the science will not be the same. As funders balance building and operating new scopes with the old, while giving grants to the astronomers who actually use those instruments, something’s gotta give. Upport for pure science in the US is always complicated, since it relies on the good graces of federal agencies and annual budgets. Three years later, the foundation asked Arecibo for management proposals that “involve a substantially reduced funding commitment from NSF.” In 2012 the NSF published a review recommending that the foundation ramp down funding to Green Bank-just 11 years after it was finished-as well as the VLBA, which can resolve a penny from about 960 miles away. In the past several years, though, the National Science Foundation has backed away from three of those instruments. Along with the Very Large Array, Arecibo Observatory, and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), it is the legacy of a boom time in federal investment in the field that began in earnest after World War II. Today, a replica of Jansky’s scope sits on the lawn in front of Green Bank Observatory, one of the four world-class public radio telescopes in the US. “Sound like steam from a radiator after traveling 30,000 light-years.” Janksy had unwittingly spawned the field of radio astronomy. “Radio waves heard from remote space,” announced The New York Times in May 1933. Jansky studied the hiss for a year, using a rudimentary antenna that looked like toppled scaffolding, before announcing its origin: The static was coming from the the galaxy itself. ![]() He found three: nearby thunderstorms, distant thunderstorms, and a steady hiss, coming from … somewhere. The communications goliath wanted to understand the static that might crackle across the ocean, so it asked an engineer named Karl Jansky to investigate its sources. IN THE EARLY 1930s, Bell Labs was experimenting with making wireless transatlantic calls. The NRAO’s Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico is 40 years old. ![]()
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