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Very Large Array Gets Expanded Capability
Active Seti points out a story about upgrades for the Very Large Array radio telescope. The improvements will increase the VLA's capabilities 10-fold, allowing it to "pick up a cell phone signal on Jupiter." Work on the 28-antenna array is already underway, and it is expected to finish by 2012. From Scientific American:
"Data gathered by all 28 of the 82-foot- (25-meter-) diameter dish antennas are brought to a correlator--a central, special-purpose computer--which merges the input into a form that allows scientists to produce detailed, high-quality images of the astronomical objects under investigation. A new fiber-optic system replaces the older waveguide system for taking data collected by the receivers to the central control building and increases the amount of data that can be delivered from the antenna to the new $17-million correlator being built by Canadian scientists and engineers to handle the increased data flow."
Is this new data provided to the SETI@Home folks, for them to process via their distributed processing network?
Speaking of which, I've been meaning to run SETI@Home on my new PC, but my new PC tends to shutdown whenever I start the SETI@Home client. Then when I go to reboot my PC, it doesn't always start up. It'll "hesitate" for a second or two. Like, the fans will start to spin up and the case light will flicker, but it will then shut down again. Can anyone help me with this?
Dave...can you hear me now? Good...am I dreaming?
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
int n = 0; while(1 = 1) { n++; int array[n]; } If you can make that run, then you have a very large array...
> pick up a cell phone signal on Jupiter
Damn warrantless wiretaps - now you have to leave the entire solar system to be safe from them!
If this thing is considered "very large" right now, would it be "very, very large" or "extremely large" after this upgrade?
Of course - even more interesting is WHO has a cellphone on Jupiter!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The earthling are listening, I have to go. Etgay attleshipbay eadyray. *click*
I was planning a trip to Jupiter next week, and I was just on the phone with Sprint asking them if they had any coverage near the Big Spot. Good to know that the people at VLA are on the job.
------ Tim O'Brien
pick up a cell phone signal on Jupiter or
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,827454,00.html
canyouhearmenow?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Even though there isn't a mobile phone network on Jupiter yet, they're taking the initiative and building the infrastructure to be able to tap Jovians' calls when the network does get that far.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The improvements will increase the VLA's capabilities 10-fold, allowing it to "pick up a cell phone signal on Jupiter."
The Bush administration pressured Congress to expand the Protect America Act to include Jupiter. Visitors to that planet will now be required to have a US passport to get back in the country.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Anyone else thought they meant this type of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array and got all excited about Data Structures? ... Ok just me then... I admit it, I didnt RTFA...
They must be receiving same "great deals" like me - Enlarge Your "array"...
This is a test; not sure which button to press to reply to initial story - gloomy!
perl or java?
fifteen jugglers, five believers
My God men! Think about what you're doing!! By measuring so much, you'll kill us ALL!!!!!
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
We cast our wiretapping net ever-wider! You guys might as well just give up now.
Jupiter is going to have cell phone coverage before our office.
... for the VLA to be able to wiretap cell phone conversations on Jupiter, but when NSA does it right here on Earth, it's wrong?
Was I the only one to see the title and think music?
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
If my cell phone was strong enough to send a signal to Jupiter, I wouldn't want to hold that monster near my head. At least, not without my tin hat on.
Was I the only one to read the title and question why someone was talking about an expandable array on Slashdot in 2008? I thought the Vector had been around for some time now.
Exactly who is expecting cell phone calls to be originating from Juipter? Is the government preparing to distract us with threats of terrorist activity on other planets? :-)
Sean
Good news for all those people on Jupiter who want to call a cab or order a pizza!
Now all we have to do is wait until they build one in space and we can talk to people in the Delta Quadrant by opening a micro-wormhole...
wikipedia says it's just 27 dishes and not 28. What's correct?
But I guess yours is funnier right?
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
When I need to expand my arrays I just use realloc().
OK, maximum distance to Jupiter, 6 AUs. Distance to proxima centauri 265606 AU. So a cell phone on Jupiter is *2 Billion* times "louder" than a cell phone around on the nearest star. Even a 50,000 Watt Radio station playing the newest hit single form "The BleepBloorp Boys" would come in something like 1/40,000th of the signal of a cellphone on jupiter. So what exactly is SETI looking for at much greater distances? (my math is a touch inexact, but you get the idea)
And not because I do not believe in other forms of intelligent life, but because they are ALREADY HERE:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1166743665260900218
Yes, almost 2 hours... yes, a strange actor in the first few mins... but just watch it for once!
Or perhaps, Very Large High Lucidity Array. The first telescope to peer into the realm of the gods.
A: Well, what kind of array is it? B: It's...ummm... very large, sir. A: Let's name it that then.
They had to change one line of code:
to:The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If you plan to add and remove elements from your Very Large Array often, a Very Large Linked List is a better solution
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Verizon will be beaming their ads to jupiter. Will they get the same idiots as we do when we call customer service?
I find it hard to belief, pick up a cell phone signal from Jupiter, I still drop calls when driving on the 10 freeway.
Fight Spammers!
Since the VLA is in the desert you can see the dishes from a long way off. A REALLY long way. Like 30 miles. From far away they look really cute, like little HO scale radio dishes. And as you drive toward them they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. They have one (a spare I think) they keep near the visitor's center at the end of a little walk, and standing under it you can look out and see all the other little HO-scale radio dishes and then look UP UP UP at the one you're standing under, which makes you feel about the size of an ant, and you realize hoe fricken huge the whole thing is.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
As a student at the New Mexico School of Mining and Technology, I know we don't pay for the thing. It's all payed by the Government through the NSF. Never the less, there are a multitude of programs for the school to use the facilities. Even though the land is owned by the school, I feel that the with all the fancy new technology, the government is gonna want a bigger cut for the use of the darn thing. Is tuition going to go up? Budgets cuts? Are the tight ties with the DoD & HLS at the Playas facilities going to play a hand? And since when has SETI been associated with the VLA? I'm a member of the NMT SETI@home team and all of our work units come from Arecibo. You know, the one that is greatly lacking finding for all of their projects.
Saturn: Ring, ring, ... ring...
Uranus: Frrthhh
Neptune: Download NepTunes now. Includes Digital Rights for those who are Armed, and Suckers Rights for those who are Tentacled.
Pluto: So we are not a planet, huh. Let's see who can out cold-shoulder who then.
Planet X: Can anybody out there tell us where we are?
With the SAR ratings of current mobiles I'd be suprised if a Nokia 6080 couldn't pick up a signal from Jupiter. Mind you my Motorola L6 doesn't seem to transmit any kind of useful signal any kind of useful distance...... it took me almost five hours to get a good signal walking through the valleys of Guam the other day.....
I know I'm nitpicking, but the VLA is not in the desert. There's very little actual desert in New Mexico, all of it in the southern portion of the state. The VLA is in the high arid plains of central New Mexico, specifically the Plains of San Agustin. The reason you can see them so well is that this area is actually a downdropped graben bordered by uplifted volcanic masse. When driving, you come down off the mountains on any side of the basin, and it's a long, slow decline.
The way I really understood how big the array was by seeing a picture of the A array, which has an antenna separation of 36 kilometers, overlayed on a city (I think it was Washington D.C.), at the visitor center. The antennas stretched beyond the boundaries of the city.
TFA claims that the VLA's silver screen debut was in "Contact". But don't I remember seeing Heywood Floyd sitting on one at the start of the film "2010"?
:)
Or was that a different array?
On another note, I drove to see the VLA in Socorro a year or so back. Absolutely awesome - in fact, so good that I just had to go to Hawaii to see the very long baseline array's western outlying dish. Now all I need to do is get to the eastern outlier in the Virgin Islands and I can send away for a free box of cornflakes
"The sum of all knowledge does not imply the knowledge of all sums" Kurt Gödel (paraphrased)