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Space Science

Green Bank Telescope Goes Live 136

Posted by Hemos from the listening-to-the-stars dept.
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. "
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Green Bank Telescope Goes Live More

Green Bank Telescope Goes Live

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  • This thing already discovered proof of intelligent life on other planets. Apparently it picked up a broadcast from Alpha Centauri of voices singing "Will The Real Slim Shady Please Shut Up"...

  • It should be operational in about 2 years. Why not use distributed computing (like SETI) to handle processing the data from this thing? It would be very cool to get data blocks from such a state-of-the-art device. Granted, it isn't looking for little green men, but I'm sure they have a fair amount of data processing to handle.
  • Sen. Byrd, is a big muckity-muck in Washington [D.C.].

  • E.T.! (Score:1)

    by Dios ( 83038 )
    E.T!

    Please phone home!

    No Roaming Charges Through End of August!*

    *Free roaming charges not available in areas of black holes, gaseous anonalies, or Klingon Empire. Roaming calls may not be placed in or around (within 5 parsecs ) or Worm Holes. All calls are subject to galaxy/system taxes. The Ferengi Empire reserves the right to cancel this promotion at any time.

  • What exactly is a 'radio telescope' anyway?

  • WVA (Score:1)

    by .sig ( 180877 )
    Well, I've got family ('kin') up in wva, and I even have a mountaineers t-shirt. It's nice to see something besides coal mines going up there. Maybe now I'll have a reason to go to the next family reunion.
    YaY
  • So if the first one lasted 16 more years then it was supposed to this one should last over 75 years. I think more places should underestimate the lastingness of their products.

  • Those cheap bastards! (Score:3)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @08:30AM (#827627)
    "...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.
    --
  • I know its a different program, but why couldn't we spend this kind of cash on a supercollider?

    How many telescopes do we need?

    We need more particle accelerators, not telescopes. What difference does it make probing the universes' interior if you don't know how atoms work?

    -Sleen
  • So the last one was built for 10 years and fell down after 26 years. This one is built for 25 years; anyone planning on replacing it when its ready to go, or letting it fall over like the old one and leave the world without a big, cool steerable telescope for 15 years while they fight about where to build the new one?

    (Great, now I sound like my computer science teacher, babbling about obslecence being one of the most important portions of the great and holy System Design Life Cycle.)

    Pretty cool, though. It's good to know that at least some of these science-for-the-sake-of-science projects are being built.

  • What exactly is a 'radio telescope' anyway?

    Well, IANAA (I Am Not an Astronomer), but basically, instead of detecting photons like a normal telescope, it detects radio waves. That makes it fun for studying things like stars, galaxies, quasars, and other things that emit lots of radio energy.
  • The telescope it replaces (designed to last 10 years) collapsed in 1988 after only 26 years

    That looks like a mistake...
  • ...because of the lack of, er, radio noise.
  • Personally I believe this will be a nice addition for people doing Sky Surveys... The more we can see, the more we will know and find out.
  • "We expect it to probe such mysteries as the birth of galaxies in the early universe, the birth of stars and the chemical composition of interstellar dust and gas. These are the very elements created in the universe that eventually become the stuff of biological systems."

    This is an interesting quotation. What I'm curious about is how it is going to probe these mysteries about the birth of galaxies. Also, this person (Rita Colwell, the director of the National Science Foundation) seems to think that other biological systems will form, and this radio telescope will help unravel that mystery. Can anyone tell me how this telescope will do that?

  • Re:Radio waves for sight? (Score:5)

    by chgreer ( 113314 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @08:35AM (#827635)
    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 [nrao.edu] for some examples of what radio astronomy is all about.
  • When the original telescope at Green Bank was put up, they made an educational film about the task of bringing the large and heavy materials over the small roads and bridges. The movie either had a title of or was commonly referred to as something like "West Virginia's Big Erection" when it was shown to attendees of the National Youth Science Camp, which is located not too far from Green Bank. Here's hoping they updated the classic movie when they put the new one up!

  • The telescope it replaces (designed to last 10 years) collapsed in 1988 after only 26 years

    It lasted 2.6 times as long as expected and you're complaing?
  • It's not going to be used for any one thing in particular. With a telescope like this, groups will apply to use the telescope, then use for a short period of time, and then go and analyze their data. So there is no large set of data needing analysis like SETI@Home, only small sets of data for each experiment using it. So there's no need for a distributed computing environment to process the data.
  • A radio telescope is a device for observing the electromagnetic emissions/reflections of distant objects. In this way it is exactly like a regular telescope. The difference is that a radio telescope is optimized to work in a different (and likely much wider) segment to the electromagnetic spectrum. The setup described here is much like a reflecting telescope except that the surfaces on the disk are not reflective to visable light, but are instead reflective to radio waves. Since it is not a requirement that the reflecting surfaces be reflective to visable light, it is possible to use materials that are stronger and more stable than glass. Therefore it is possible to make the device much larger and more sensitive to very weak signals.
    ________________
    They're - They are
    Their - Belonging to them
  • Check out this page,
    http://www.setileague.org/askdr/magnify.htm

    It talks about what a radio telescope is and
    how they work

  • why waste all that money? (Score:3)

    by ebbv ( 34786 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @08:37AM (#827641) Homepage

    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
  • Fortunately, no other industries suffer from this "problem".
  • I thought that arrays of smaller radio telescopes are much more powerful than one giant one. And that is why they rarely make giant ones now-a-days... Can anyone back me up here?


    -- "Almost everyone is an idiot. If you think I'm exaggerating, then you're one of them."
  • Close. Radio waves are photons, just at different energies. This is just a telescope that is designed to collect electromagnetic waves at a low frequency, where our eyes don't detect them.
  • With all these new telescopes were coming out with how come we cant use these to see pictures of like europa or pluto or something. I know they can, but the pictures are really bad / small / pixelated from what ive seen. I guess we have no chance of ever spotting another planet around another star if we cant even barely see our own! . So what im wondering is how much more will these telescopes have to be in order to get reasonably good resolution on our own planets. (and yes I realize that non stars are alot harder to see because the only light they give off is reflected.. but still.)

  • Likely, there would be no gain....distributed processing of the SETI@home type is kind of unique in data analysis, being processor limited on relatively small amounts of data. Most large experiments (radio telescopes, particle accelerator detectors, etc.) have data analysis requirements that turn out to be bandwidth limited, and not processor limited; you end up having to move a few megabytes of data for each event of interest, but then you only need to spend relatively small amounts of time comparing a few of the pieces of data to a given criteria. Big collider experiments use large farms of cheap machines connected to very high speed networks to do their work, not something that scales well to low bandwidth networks like the Internet.

  • Re:Radio waves for sight? (Score:3)

    by funk_phenomenon ( 162242 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @08:39AM (#827647)
    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

  • the same reason your machine doesnt have 5 small 200MHz processors instead of a 1 GHz one.
  • Isn't it cheaper to build a large array of smaller steerable dishes? Or do you get a better signal with just one big one?
    And 75Mil does sound like a good deal for a .gov project... that's only about $6000 a day.
  • I clicked on that MS link wanting to be a good citizen and help stamp out MicroSoft in any way I can. Oh, *that* MS! :P

  • Great, but... (Score:3)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @08:42AM (#827651) Homepage Journal
    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 [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000

  • It's getting harder to find any public construction in West Virginia that doesn't have Byrd's name on it.

    Actual Scene from a WVa Coffee Shop:

    CALIFORNIAN is reading a newspaper.

    WAITRESS: "Whatcha'll readin' for?"

  • A telescope is just a device for collecting and focusing electromagnetic energy onto a detector (be it a solid state device, a camera, your eyeball, etc). Most telescopes that you think of are optical telescopes, and look at visible light. A radio telescope is a big antenna that looks at the radio section of the spectrum. There are also infrared telescopes, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray telescopes.

  • Isn't it sad that the telescope should be named for a senator (already famous) rather than a scientist?

    Don't get me wrong -- I think it's better to have the telescope than not, even if you have to kiss a little senatorial hiney in order to get funding. Byrd was a respectable fellow. But it's a real commentary on the motives of America's politicians (who I think are underpaid and thus feel justified in seeking compensatory perks, like this one).

  • More info :) (Score:5)

    by seanmeister ( 156224 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @08:44AM (#827655)
    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. [nrao.edu]


    Sean

  • Re:Planets? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Radio telescopes are good at looking through big clouds of dust and gas that visible-light telescopes can't see through. A radio telescope can pick out large planets orbiting other stars.
    We generally don't use radio telescopes to look at things in our own solar system (except the sun).

  • Let's see that's US$4.69/lbs.

    More than decent steak but I guess that's not bad purchasing in a "This product is shipped by weight not by volume" kinda way....

    =tkk

  • OK, let's see what the words mean:

    tele - remote, distant (from greek:tele - far off)
    scope - an instrument to see (again greek:skopein, to see)
    radio - 1.The wireless transmission through space of electromagnetic waves in the approximate frequency range from 10 kilohertz to 300,000 megahertz.

    (all information taken from http://www.websters.com)

    So, this thing looks (scope) into the distance (tele) for radio transmissions.

  • I live in Charlottesville, so I know where I am going for an afternoon of fun.

  • "With all these new telescopes were coming out with how come we cant use these to see pictures of like europa or pluto or something.... I guess we have no chance of ever spotting another planet around another star if we cant even barely see our own!"

    IIRC, pretty much all the extrasolar planets (those not orbiting our sun) were observed via indirect methods. They'd aim the telescope at the star and measure the "wobbling" caused by the planet gravitationally tugging the star as it went around. Another method is the dimming effect a planet would have as it eclipses the star it orbits.

    However, I'd image big honkin' huge telescopes like that are optimized to look at stuff that's really really far away and not stuff that's relatively close like planets in our solar system. It's like how you really can't focus on something when it's right in your face -- your eyes don't work well at that close of range.

    Also, this is a radio telescope, not an optical one. You wouldn't be able to see the planet anyway, although you could measure any radio emissions or radio reflections coming from its direction.


    --

  • Left out (Score:5)

    by thesparkle ( 174382 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @08:55AM (#827661) Homepage
    "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.

  • 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.

    Noise can be a problem for radio telescopes, but there are tricks to filtering out unwanted signals, such as looking for signals which vary in position while looking at a constant direction on the skydome. The most important facet of noise reduction for the radio astronomy community though is that most of the important wavebands are protected - no tv, radio or mobile phone systems are allowed to use these frequencies. Examples of these frequencies are the 21cm hydrogen line, 1.1GHz, 5 GHz, 15GHz, 30 GHz and there are others. So mechanical noise, such as Johnson noise, are the main factors.

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • SETI!=SETI@HOME
    GREEN BANK!=ARECIBO

    Geesh!
    This telescope isn't even for getting electromagenetic radiation, let alone part of the SETI clan.

    RC5 will be cracked!
    So what? I have a neural net somewhere on a 5 1/4"

    SETI should return results!
    That's what I'm talkin 'bout
  • Ok, it's OT, but it's still funny. Much better than all the LD commercials I have to suffer each day during my 1 hr (each way) commute.

    Maybe they'll show it off in a new James Bond movie...

    "Let's get rrrrrready to rrrrruuummmble!"(tm)(C)

    "In this ...uh... hemisphere, weighing it at 180lbs in green black tights, with a license to kill, James Bond!"

    "And in the other ...uh... hemisphere, weighing in at 220lbs, in pink Spandex, Ernst Blofeld!"

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • Damn /. They stripped my sarcasm tags.
    ________________
    They're - They are
    Their - Belonging to them
  • Yea Im aware that the planets have been found by indirect methods such as their wobble on their stars. But this wong tell you anything much about them besides maby their size and positions. If we could "see" them we might be able to determine their chemical composition.

  • At last! (Score:3)

    by Jeff_Uphoff ( 4498 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @08:58AM (#827667) Homepage
    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 remember driving through West Virgina. In Virginia the highway I was on had only two-lanes. When you go into WV it went to four lanes. Then about twenty miles later or so it goes back to two-lanes driving into Maryland. There was virtualy no traffic on the highway anywhere. Just Sen. Byrd bringing home the bacon like no one else can.

    Now we have a $75 million dollar radio telescope. Just what we need a radio telescopes when the gov't is already several trillion in debt. (And it will end up costing more than that. After all someone has to operate it and maintain it, just so some scientists can get their favorite station from alpha centauri)
  • 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.

    One of the links on the site answers that question. Apparently the GBT is inside a National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ). If you click on the link you will see the area covered--quite large. I believe this helps minimize any interferance.

    Besides, do they even have radios in WV? (Just kidding--as an Ohioian who gets constantly cracked on by his New England friends, I had to put in a jab)

  • Won't the RT's proximity to the east coast megalopolis suffer it interference problems.

    Probably not a big issue, for three reasons:

    (1) Many of the frequencies of interest are not used by commercial broadcasting equipment (if I remember correctly, things like the spin flip transition of ground state atomic hydrogen, and the prominent HNO lines...but I could be remembering incorrectly here)

    (2) The mobile noise generators (like jets and cellphones) are on frequencies that can be ignored.

    (3) The fixed noise generators have a measurable, known location and transmission power, and so can be trivially monitored and removed....and they are generally behind mountains and below the interesting horizon anyway.

    Although you should take this with a grain of salt, since I haven't done any work with this stuff in a few years.

  • The Supercollider's costs were in the multiple billions. They had overruns that cost much more than this telescope. After the last huge overrun, Congress had had enough and cancelled it.

    See Freeman Dyson's book Infinite in all Directions for evidence on how it's often the lower cost science that pays off best.

  • As certain as death and taxes: if it's built with federal money and it's named after Robert Byrd (or in the spirit of bipartisanship, Bud Schuster), then it's a waste of money.
  • buy the banner ads?

    signed... The Punch the Monkey Guy

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A) Does this thing run Linux?

    B) If not, why the hell is it on here?

    C) If yes, *BSD would have been a much better choice!


    Penis Fish Guy, posting anonymously to conserve my precious karma.

    Get youself a penis fish today! (Or a penis bird, they are cool too)

  • Original Telescope and more (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The original telescope was built because construction of the 140 ft telescope fell behind schedule due to the complexity of the design. The 300 ft telescope was built in order to provide a working telescope quickly. It was designed and built quickly and cheaply. Probably the best investment ever made by a government in science. Since it was a transit telescope it moved every 20 minutes or so during it's lifetime. Basically it shook itself apart very slowly.

    Some stories I've heard:

    1) When the telescope operator called his boss to tell him the telescope fell over, he was asked if he had been drinking.

    2) During the process to line up funding for the replacement, the guy in charge of the NSF wanted to put a gravity wave thing there instead of a telescope. He was told Senator Byrd wanted a telescope.

    Note: these are all second hand info. No warranty.

    At any rate I have seen it and it is truly an impressive structure. It should produce some very impressive results as well.

    Also look at the AIPS++ webpage at http://www.cv.nrao.edu/aips2/daily/docs/aips++.htm l one of the supported systems is Linux.

  • There's an excellent bit of commentary about this in "The Puzzle Palace" - aparently, the CIA and various defense intellegence agencies have established listening outposts there, precisely because of the lack of RF interference.

  • There is a National Radio Quiet Zone [nrao.edu] that protects the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank and the NSA intercept station at Sugar Grove.
  • This is a pretty unique dish: assymetrical, side-mounted feed arm, movable surface panels, and laser-assisted ranging.

    Sounds like a weapon that is available in Quake!

  • Sen. Byrd is famous for bringing a wide range of (mostly pork-barrel) federal projects to West Virginia. The very appropriately named Bureau of the Public Debt [savingsbonds.gov] is located there, for example, despite the fact that the market for Treasury bonds is based in New York.

    In this case, the scientific community will probably benefit, but I do wonder what the opportunity cost is...

    sulli


  • If we could always tune in at night and see what scientist were seeing, it would be awsome. They could have a little caption about what was happening or something along those lines. I think it would be great to sit, watch, and know whats going on as they move around the sky...
  • From personal experience, I can heartily recommend it.

    It's worth a trip out of your way to take the tour. It is a beautiful area, not far from where I was born, and the tour is really interesting. They take you by the telescope SETI rents, and they have a flag out if they're listening while you're there. Only diesel engines are allowed in the area, because traditional engines generate electronic interference. The area also forbids microwaves or other devices with lots of RF noise. Plus there are cool T-shirts, a must-have for any geek. ;-)
  • In a crude sense, the bigger the size (huge with an array) the finer the resolution (think pizels). But the bigger the actual receiving area (actual metal the signal hits), the smaller the signal you can receive. It's a tradeoff. You spend money to get more of what you don't have.
  • Can you burn ants with it....... in another continent?
  • For those who don't know what Greenbank is, also the home of other telescopes...these include

    - 140 foot radio telescope (closed last July)
    - GBI (Green Bank Interferometer)...a set of 85-foot telescopes
    - OVLBI...a huge satelite tracking station.

    Greenbank is one of 9 (If I remember correctly) tracking stations able to conmmunicate with the Hubble Space Telescope and is going to be one of the 2 or 3 major tracking stations for Arise - the next generation of space telescope.

    Around the area is a military enforced "Quiet Zone". It is true that Green Bank is located in the "backwoods" of WV, but this is the reason for its existance. Belive it or not, this location is right up there with Arecibo in its usefulness to the astronomical community (maybe more so).
  • Good tool for science, bad person to name it after.

  • Re:Great, but... (Score:4)

    by codegoblin ( 110316 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @09:29AM (#827686)
    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
  • Visibiilty of distant objects is ultimately limited by diffraction within the optics. Earth based observations are further hampered by the several miles of atmosphere that the light has to pass through. To get better pictures, you have to get closer (which is why it would be nice to send more probes out to the planets). Radio telescopes aren't terribly useful for looking at planets because they tend not to be strong radio sources (Jupiter throws off copious amounts of radio wave though)

    imabug
  • stopping ACTIVE senators from having crap named after them? EVERYTHING that is new in that state has his name on it.... and it is all built with money he pork-barrelled for the state. Now if he wants to spend HIS money on it, I'm all for naming stuff after him. Now back to the topic... here is a picture I took on vacation over July 4th. Kind of anachronistic if you notice the G.O.B's (Good Ole Boys) to the right of the barn loading hay. http://www.lestersworld.co m/vacation/disk07/MVC-016X.JPG [lestersworld.com]

  • I spent a summer in green bank, WV (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 25, 2000 @09:31AM (#827689)
    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!
  • SETI!=SETI@HOME

    Yes, SETI@HOME is how SETI processes it's data.

    GREEN BANK!=ARECIBO

    Right, one is in West Virginia, the other in Puerto Rico.

    Geesh! This telescope isn't even for getting electromagenetic radiation, let alone part of the SETI clan.

    Where do you get your revelations? They *BOTH* observe radio waves, which just happen to be lower frequencies of the Electromagnentic spectrum.

  • I thought that aluminum foil hats are only able to block the Orbital Mind Control lasers.

    Maybe the Illuminatti got to *you* too... I shouldn't trust what I read on /. anymore, they've gotten to everyone!

  • he area also forbids microwaves or other devices with lots of RF noise

    No microwave?

    How do they feed the resident geeks then?
  • The two work off of each other.

    For example, you could build particle accelerators until the cows come home searching for a fourth and fifth lepton family.

    We don't. Why? Because physics + astronomy tells us that we have a certain percentage of helium in the universe, and the amount created during the Big Bang is very tightly constrained by the number of lepton families. Current helium percentages allow for three families, and just barely four if we squeezed and fudged the numbers.

    The Universe is the poor man's particle accelerator, as the saying goes. Helium again: discovered as existing in the sun before it was found here on Earth.

    The two sciences help one another. Killing one in favor of the other isn't helping either of them.

  • That and the collider wasn't expected to do much more than confirm existing theory. It's not like the thing was likely to bring about world peace, solve world hunger, or dispose of tons of nuclear waste.
  • Iirc, there's no "night" for a radio-telescope, is there?

    So... why waste precious dinner / club / MustSeeTV / whatever time with a webcam when you could be "contributing to scientific research" from work? : )

    (Besides, it'd be more "webwaveanalyzer" than webcam, wouldn't it?)

  • No wonder! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We're not seeing any alien transmissions because we're ignoring their TV and cell phone transmissions! DUH! Am I the only one that sees a problem with this? Imagine some alien civilization blocking out all our TV, cell phone, and radio stations.. what would be left to listen to!? DUH!
  • "This telescope will allow scientists on Earth to touch the stars without leaving the hills of West Virginia"

    Wow, how profound. Too bad Galileo didn't say something like that when he first built a telescope. Just goes to show how the Senator has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with this project.

    "You'll die up there son, just like I did!" - Abe Simpson
  • In addition to what others have said, it's in a narrow valley with major cities several ranges of the Appalachians away--you have to go over five or six ridges, as I recall, from Washington, DC, to get there. That's an awful lot of radio frequency insulation, as anyone who's tried to pick up a TV or radio station in the area can tell you.

    That, plus the National Radio Quiet Zone referred to above, make it actually one of the better places in the country for it.
  • As soon as the local teenage yokels find out it's a 100 *meter* telescope, I'll bet they fill it with bullet holes.
  • SETI is the search for extraterrestrial inteligence.

    ONE of the many ways of research, is through the seti@home program developed at berkeley a few years ago. But the SETI institute was around LONG before SETI@home was even around.

    By "getting electromagnetic radiation" I meant from distances further off then satelites of the earth.

    Look around the comments with -1 and 0 and all they talk about is SETI@H.

  • this probably wouldn't be terribly entertaining, as all the data acquisition is done by computer and transferred by tape or FTP perhaps to the researcher's home institution for processing. Plus the telescope might be pointed at a particular position in the sky for hours on end. Might as well have a "Watch the grass grow" webcam.

    imabug
  • Byrd was a respectable fellow.

    Umm, he's not dead. And as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, his hiney has been kissed about as much as anyone's in D.C.
  • Reknowned physicist siokaos made the shocking announcement today that radio waves are not, as had been previously thought, part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

    "Radio waves pushed the real electromagnetic spectrum out of the way years ago," he said, "they fooled Einstein and Maxwell, but not me!".

    siokaos is not sure what happened to the "real" electromagnetic spectrum, but he is currently working on the theory that they evolved into fish.


    --
  • A particle accelerator of the class that would actually be useful today would cost orders of magnitude more money than this telescope. Plus, I'd argue that there is always need for more telescopes -- getting time on any major scope is hard as hell (spoken like the bitter grad student I am), and there are a lot of things out there to look at. :-)

  • The two sciences help one another. Killing one in favor of the other isn't helping either of them.

    I can't agree more. From what little physics and astronomy I've had (undergraduate-level survey courses only), the correlations between them were remarkable. My professor at the time was doing research, afair, on "seeing" what the conditions were like just moments after the Big Bang. He did his research primarily with radio telescopes, but a lot of theoretical collaboration came from the boffins down the hall, in the quantum physics portion of the department.

    Of course, it's been more than a few years since then, so my memory's a bit fuzzy as well.


    --
  • Umm, he's not dead. And as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, his hiney has been kissed about as much as anyone's in D.C

    Oops. Change that to present tense. And just think, after all that ass-kissing and all those years in the public eye, some fool citizen didn't even know he was still alive. He needs a couple more telescopes ;-)
  • The creation of new galaxies is often very radio-intensive. Much more information can be 'seen' by radio telescopes than light telescopes. Especially because of the atmosphere, etc. Even hubble has to deal with high atmospheric effects botching up the picture.
    Also, the further out you look the older you are looking into time. It goes into relativity theory. For instance, if you had a really high powered telescope and a mirror that was one light year away from you and you did a little dance and came back two years later with your telescope and looked at the mirror you would see yourself doing the dance. It takes all electromagnetic radiation (speed of light) the same amount of time to travel through space (discounting superstring theory and all the new physics research to make the example simple) so if you have a galaxy being born 72 billion light years away, you are in effect looking at something that is 72 billion years old.
    Physics rocks :)

    nerdfarm.org [nerdfarm.org]
  • Actually, it's not a radiotelescope, it's an IRIDIUM satellite blasting particle emitter gun, constructed by the Secret Astronomer Cabal Dedicated to the Eradication of Iridium.
    Maybe they can get a contract from Motorola for 'deorbiting' the birds...
    ---
  • Arrays will produce a higher degree of resolution whereas a large dish will be able to detect fainter signals.

    Although you have a larger surface area with the array, each reciever in the array is only recieving from one dish so the sensitivity of the array to a signal is the same as the sensitivity of one of the dishes. The effect is not additive. The advantage to the array is that signals can be taken from multiple points and run through a computer. An analogy would be making a 3D picture from two pictures taken at slightly different points. The new 3D picture has more information than the two 2D pictures. That's basically what arrays are good at. They compare different signals from the same source to get more information out.

    Large dishes simply concentrate more energy on the reciever. This allows the reciever to see weaker signals than with a smaller dish. The array doesn't see the weak signal because each dish does not amplify the signal enough for the reciever to pick it up. Thus the signal is never seen.

    Now if you could get the array of smaller dishes to focus the signal onto one reciever, then you'd have some power.




  • I used up all my moderation points this morning. Plus, if I had moderated you, it would have gone away when I posted.

    When you've got as much karma as me, the occasional -1 hurts less ;-)

    --
  • Some more info for all you hams out there...

    To mark the occasion of the telescope's dedication, the NRAO Amateur Radio Club will be operating special event station W9GFZ from the observatory grounds over this weekend. (W9GFZ was the call sign that Grote Reber held in 1937, when he built the first dish antenna for radioastronomy in his Wheaton, IL backyard...kind of a cool tribute to history there.) More details in this week's ARRL Letter. [arrl.org]

    Eric
    --

  • Slashdot Science Features (Score:4)

    by befan ( 22261 ) on Friday August 25, 2000 @11:11AM (#827724) Journal
    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.
  • Here's the nice, fluffy page. [nps.gov] Somewhere near the bridge is a nice little museum, put up by the visitors bureau, which details the critical view of it as a pork-barrel project, as there was little traffic around the sleepy little town of Fayetteville prior to construction. Main benefit was expected to be for trucking, IIRC. However, the bridge can easily be defended now as it has brought whitewater rafters, bungee jumpers, hikers and much other recreational use revenues to the area. (Worth a few trips, to be sure.)

    My bone of contention over the choice of WV for the Green Bank Radio Telescope is there are obviously much better locations, particularly in the west and at higher elevations.

    But who knows, they may make tourist dollars, yet off this thing. Maybe there'll be a bungee jumping day...

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • The telescope is sited in a "radio-free zone" with mountains surrounding it. It is pretty well sheltered from commercial/industrial interference. The USN's listening post at Suger Grove WV is also a major radio receiver, probably also well-shielded from the metroplex. But it's a secret! You didn't hear about it from me! There isn't any Navy base in those hills! Don't be stu

    Michigan's Upper Penninsula nearly got one of these projects, but the locals objected, prefering to live the obscure, quiet life, like people in Maine. IIRC the USN uses Long Wave, frequencies belw 200Khz.

    Hey, don't you guys knock? What the he

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • Some of the other people here have already answered the basic question: a radio telescope acts much like an optical telescope, except it uses radio waves which then get converted into images by computer. Why use radio waves? For one thing, you can pick up emissions from warm interstellar gas that isn't hot enough to actually glow visibly; some of the basic ionization effects in the universe occur at specific microwave frequencies; and radio doesn't get as distorted as much as light does when passing through the atmosphere.

    The real fun part comes when you start hooking multiple radio telescopes together to perform VLBI: Very Long Baseline Interferometry. By viewing the same object from multiple locations, you can pick up details that either telescope by itself would have missed. The more radio telescopes you have, and the further apart they are, the better resolution you can get on the final image.

    For really long baselines, the Japanese launched a radio telescope up into orbit a few years back. By itself it's not all that good; radio telescopes don't get as much of a boost from being outside of the atmosphere. But combine that with telescopes on the ground at the same time, and the combined system has a resolution over a hundred times better than the Hubble. People have actually managed to pick up details from quasars that nobody had been able to see until recently.

    Of course, you can also reverse VLBI: once you have a quasar or some other highly distant object mapped out, you can invert the calculations and determine the exact relative locations of the telescopes from a new observation. This means, for example, you can determine if two telescopes have moved further apart since the last time you looked at this quasar: you can track continental drift. Or the rotational period of the Earth to sub-millisecond precision. Or there's been talk of using radio telescopes and VLBI to help correct for phase drift errors in GPS satellites.

    Not to mention some of the other work on tracking space debris and meteors by using radio telescopes...

    -- Bryan Feir
  • Byrd is not a respectable fellow in all eyes.

    Check out how he has spent your money:

    http://www.political-research.com/ps201/Lectures /Congress/Byrd_Pork_table.htm

    And are our politicians overpaid? Not according to the latest law signed a couple of months ago:

    http://www.kentuckyconnect.com/heraldleader/news /062900/nationaldocs/29Congress-PayRaise.h tm

  • There's a West Virgina senator named Green Bank?
  • Why such a large dish? I am not a radio astronomer, so I am sure there is a good reason. I understand that it is a large parbolic reflector, and of course the bigger it is, the more it can gather. I also like the idea of the single arm mount (damn that thing is HUGE!)...

    Why did they choose to build it this way, instead of a large array (such as done in NM)? Is it because errors or other anomalies are introduced into the data when the individual data streams are "combined" in an array - that might mask something or another?

    Please, someone - enlighten me!

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
  • There are some cool pictures of the 300ft one that collapsed here [nrao.edu]

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