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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. "
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.
Sean
"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.
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
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.