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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."
int n = 0; while(1 = 1) { n++; int array[n]; } If you can make that run, then you have a very large array...
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
Tagged: echelon
canyouhearmenow?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Its the aliens messing with your computer. They don't want to be found.
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
I'd say there're little aliens in your power supply, blowing a self repairing fuse whenever the load approaches a certain treshold.
.o(a case light, gee)
Get an alien-free PSU, or one with a higher treshold.
Of course you could also reduce the load..
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
perl or java?
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Yeah, the guy further up with his larger amount of arrays, each one a little bigger than the last.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
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.
you have a serious heat problem, probably an improperly installed heat sink.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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
SETI@home data comes from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico not the VLA
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
It's probably heat - I suggest downloading speedfan (a free utility) and look at the temps while SETI is running, if the CPU is getting too hot - like over 65C - you probably need to either upgrade your HS/F or stop using SETI before you cause permanent damage. Other possibilities are a bad motherboard or power supply (or just about any other component) but you'd have to trouble-shoot to find out.
More is Better.
I'd check your RAM. http://www.memtest86.com/ or use any Ubuntu disk.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
When I need to expand my arrays I just use realloc().
There are 28 dishes, 27 of which are used in the array and one is always out on service rotation.
I visited the VLA a couple of years ago. Those dishes are freaking huge and you can't get a good prospective of how big they really are until you stand under one. They had a small building for tourists and my friends and I spent about an hour inside learning about the array. They spoke of the impending upgrades on some of the displays. The original design left huge gaps in the radio spectrum and the upgrades are supposed to fill in all the gaps. If I remember correctly, until the upgrades are completed the array wasn't able to see even half the available spectrum.
It really is an interesting site and should be on every nerd's list of "Things to see before I die". =)
I know what the Internet is, what the hell is this Interweb business?!
Or perhaps, Very Large High Lucidity Array. The first telescope to peer into the realm of the gods.
I suspect smebody at SciAm crunched their numbers wrong, here are some real stats: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/evla/
Were that I say, pancakes?
A: Well, what kind of array is it? B: It's...ummm... very large, sir. A: Let's name it that then.
Also of relevance:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jansky
Were that I say, pancakes?
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:[.]
Support SETI@home
Isotropic leakage signals are too faint to detect. The garbage people will tell you about aliens watching "I Love Lucy" is just that, garbage. TV signals have degraded into unintelligible nonsense before the even get to the first star.
Support SETI@home
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?
The old cell phones punched out 3 Watts analog and are being EOL'd here on Earth, but we didn't find ET talking so we figured he must be using one of the new digital cell phones that pput out a lot less power so we need a more sensitive receiver to hear the same distance!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Nah, it's Dr. Arroway saving power for cancer research. She already knows we're not along in the universe.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
Um, no, since the VLA isn't on school property. The operations building is on campus, but it wasn't built with state or school dollars, nor does the state or school pay to maintain it. As a matter of fact, having the building on campus contributes funds to the school, making it cheaper for you. Ask a researcher on campus how much of their grant money goes directly to the school. When I was there it was over 40%. I'm not sure if the NRAO contributes that amount, but they surely do pay to use the campus and it's infrastructure.
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)