Green Bank Telescope Goes Live

ptbrown writes: "The world's largest steerable radio telescope is being dedicated today at Green Bank, W.Va. The 100 meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (named after a West Virginia senator) is 485 feet tall, weighs 16 million pounds, cost $75 million, took almost 10 years to build, and is expected to last for at least 25 years. The telescope it replaces (designed to last 10 years) collapsed in 1988 after only 26 years. This is a pretty unique dish: assymetrical, side-mounted feed arm, movable surface panels, and laser-assisted ranging. And they give tours, so if you're ever around southern West Virginia think about stopping by. "

Comments

Those cheap bastards!

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

"...the telescope it replaces (designed to last 10 years) collapsed in 1988 after only 26 years."

It was designed to last 10 and only lasted 26? They must have skimped on the corner-cutting.
--

Re:Radio waves for sight?

[chgreer]

Light is just a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that runs all the way from radio waves (very low frequency and long wave lengths) to stuff like gamma rays (high frequency and short wavelengths). All of these are 'light' in a sense and carry useful astronomical data.

For example, many galaxies (known as radio galaxies) emit strongly in these low frequency bands and a telescope such as this allows them to be observed so we might get some clue as to what's going on.

Radio telescopes must be huge to achieve a decent resolution, which goes as (wavelength)/(size of aperature). In this case wavelength is on the order of centimeters to meters and aperature is on the order of 100 meters.

Also, the Very Large Array, as seen in the adaptation of Carl Sagen's Contact is a radio telescope.

See NRAO for some examples of what radio astronomy is all about.

why waste all that money?

[ebbv]

the bum around the corner picks up signals from deep space with his little aluminum foil hat! that couldn't have cost more than $0.20..
...dave

Re:Radio waves for sight?

[funk_phenomenon]

An interesting effect of radio waves from space is that they cause interference on tvs and radios. If you take an old tv, raise the antennas and turn down the brightness, most of the white noise seen is actually of astronomical origin. Scientists just use the telescopes to focus this background noise to allow for accuracy in seeing the source (in this case one arcsecond) and interpreting the data.

Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears

Great, but...

[ackthpt]

Obviously political arm twisting is why such a project ends up in West Va. (The New River Gorge Bridge was another example, which ultimately has paid off well for WV)

Question: Won't the RT's proximity to the east coast megalopolis suffer it interference problems: noise from jet traffic, radio, TV, etc.? I'm sure a certain amount of this can be filtered, but the less need for filtering the better, IMHO.

Vote Naked 2000

Re:Great, but...

[codegoblin]

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank is there because of the lack of radio noise... The mountains block out interference from cities, although there isn't really a "megalopolis" of note within any reasonable distance. As far as nearby sources go, radio stations have to get special licenses if they broadcast in its range, etc. They even send technicians out to repair broken appliances in the surrounding area if it is causing notable interference (such as microwaves)... And on my final bit of rant, they don't allow vehicles with sparkplugs out near the telescopes.... (gee, can't tell I have taken that tour too many times, aye?)

IIRC, there are four NRAO locations, the headquarters in Charlottesville VA and telescopes at Green Bank, Socorro NM, and Tucson AZ

More info :)

[seanmeister]

AutoCAD drawings of the new telescope, equipment room rack wiring diagrams, and some other interesting stuff are available a former Green Bank observatory employee's homepage.

Sean

Left out

[thesparkle]

"The 100 meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (named after a West Virginia senator)"
has been nicknamed, "The Porkbarrel" out of respect for the free-spending representative and his spending practices since arriving in Congress.

Besides the 75million taxpayer dollars for the telescope, 44 million dollars in highway improvements were also added to the area. In addition, 22 million dollars was allocated with the project to maintain West Virginia's Fort Wayne, the only US Army post still servicing stage coaches and mule wagons for our nation's armed forces. Finally, a 14 million dollar grant was included with the telescope money for a new medical study into the benefits of leeches in medicine for the University of West Virginia.

Thousands of the Senator's supporters turned out for the festivities including government subsidy recipient Marla Thornhill of Buck Hill, WV. "My tobacco farm would have been closed down if it had not been for the generosity of Senator Byrd. Without those tobacco subsidies, I would have to quit growing the stuff and switch crops. Millions of Americans have to be thankful for Senator Byrd's committment to the family tobacco farm".

Senator Byrd was expected to arrive later today aboard an Air Force C141 cargo jet along with 40 of his staffers before leaving for a fact finding tour of Bermuda for the next week.

At last!

[Jeff_Uphoff]

Before coming to Transmeta, I worked for NRAO for five years (1993-1998). Some of that time was spent working on part of a software project (AIPS++) related to this telescope.

Most people probably don't realize the immensity of the software challenge that handling the amount of data this telescope will produce is. It's not just a monster piece of hardware--it's going to produce simply tremendous amounts of data; the software aspects of this unique telescope will be as interesting as its hardware aspects.

I spent a summer in green bank, WV

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years ago I worked as a summer intern in Green Bank, WV at the NRAO installation. At the time, all that existed of the new telescope was a huge flat concrete pad. This post might be off-topic, but maybe I can convey something of what it was like to work there (not that my memory is perfect):

* The town (really two towns - Arbovale as well) is very small - a few hundred people, many of them employeed by the observatory. Unlike many small towns in Appalachia, these two towns do well economically because of the government spending there. There aren't many other towns around - they intentionally put radio observatories in places where there isn't a lot of interference.

* To track what radio interference there is, they have this truck that looks like an ice cream truck that's got some really outlandish antennas on it. This weird guy with a beard and sunglasses would slowly drive up and down the roads looking for interference. I'm sure it really freaked out the locals.

* More interference: at least when I was there, there were no gasoline cars allowed on the observatory grounds because the spark plugs (or something) interfered with the telescopes. Instead, there were these old diesel taxis - Checkered Cabs that are probably still used only in Havana these days. You could sign one out and they would generate huge blue clouds of exhaust.

* There was no hunting allowed and so there were HERDS of deer. Really. I rode my bike past herds of maybe 50 deer in fields, just eating and looking completely relaxed. If only I had had a blunderbus! There were several such groups. It ruined me forever for the novelty of seeing a deer - whatever! I saw hundreds of them.

* Sometimes, they would put this weird attachment on the 140' telescope that would quickly move the receiver back and forth about twice a second (I have no idea what it was for). It would make this intense, slow, drumbeat sound that would echo down the valley...kachunk...kachunk...kachunk.

* It was an excellent place for mountain-biking. The local mountains were at most a thousand feet tall and were covered in old logging roads in various states of disrepair. You could take it easy or really get a workout. * The people at the observatory were very nice and professional. It was a wonderful experience for me (I was there for computer work, not astronomy), but at the time - early 90's - we only had a modem-speed connection to the outside world! Ouch! * Some of the control computers (at least when I was there - maybe they've been replaced since) there are REALLY old - 60's era stuff. It was just easier to keep the old stuff running than connect new machines to the telescopes. There were hard drives that looked like washing machines and even a punchcard reader (a backup, not in active use). The new telescope, that just went live today, however, was slated to have the latest and greatest computer equipment.

That's all the I remember...Thanks for the memories, Slashdot!

Slashdot Science Features

[befan]

This post brings me to my most interesting
feature request from slashdot.

Remember all the questions you asked when you
were eight years old ? ever heard any answers ?
Like what really is a radio telescope (answered
excellently at the beginning of the comments) ?
how does a photosensor work ? what *is*
bandwidth (i mean, is a property of wire? or is
it something to do with material? or what?)
or linguistics.

Even some excellent newbie tech questions. Like
TCP/IP stack or ray tracing or PCMCIA or
filesystems.

I am sure there are people out there who can
contribute a lot of good features to us by writing
up small features on a lot these kinds of
questions.

These features and the ensuing technical discussion, IMHO, will be far more interesting
than the licensing issues which are talked about
way too often.