

Green Bank Telescope Goes Live 136
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. "
It already found something... (Score:1)
SETI like program (Score:1)
Porkbarrel and Science once again converge (Score:1)
E.T.! (Score:1)
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.
Radio waves for sight? (Score:2)
WVA (Score:1)
YaY
This one should last about 75 years? (Score:1)
Those cheap bastards! (Score:3)
It was designed to last 10 and only lasted 26? They must have skimped on the corner-cutting.
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Supercollider? (Score:1)
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
How long will it really last? (Score:1)
(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.
Re:Radio waves for sight? (Score:1)
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.
Not bad! (Score:1)
That looks like a mistake...
That's why it's in WV (Score:2)
Oh, that's nice... (Score:1)
How is this going to work? (Score:1)
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)
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.
Did they make a movie? (Score:1)
only 26 years? (Score:1)
It lasted 2.6 times as long as expected and you're complaing?
Re:SETI like program (Score:2)
Re:Radio waves for sight? (Score:2)
________________
They're - They are
Their - Belonging to them
Re:Radio waves for sight? (Score:2)
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)
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:Those cheap bastards! (Score:1)
Size over arrays? (Score:1)
-- "Almost everyone is an idiot. If you think I'm exaggerating, then you're one of them."
Re:Radio waves for sight? (Score:1)
Planets? (Score:1)
Re:SETI like program (Score:2)
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)
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Re:Size over arrays? (Score:1)
Large Array (Score:1)
And 75Mil does sound like a good deal for a
Oooooh! Deceptive link! (Score:1)
Great, but... (Score:3)
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
Re:Porkbarrel and Science once again converge (Score:1)
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?"
Re:Radio waves for sight? (Score:1)
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.
Why should a politician get the credit? (Score:2)
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)
Sean
Re:Planets? (Score:1)
We generally don't use radio telescopes to look at things in our own solar system (except the sun).
Good buy by the lbs. (Score:1)
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
Re:Radio waves for sight? (Score:1)
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.
not far (Score:1)
Re:Planets? (Score:2)
"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.
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Left out (Score:5)
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.
Re:Great, but... (Score:2)
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
What does this have to do with SETI? (Score:1)
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
Re:E.T.! (OT) (Score:1)
Maybe they'll show it off in a new James Bond movie...
"Let's get rrrrrready to rrrrruuummmble!"(tm)(C)
"In this
"And in the other
Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
Re:Porkbarrel and Science once again converge (Score:1)
________________
They're - They are
Their - Belonging to them
Re:Planets? (Score:1)
At last! (Score:3)
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.
Gotta love Sen. Byrd (Score:1)
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)
Re:Great, but... (Score:1)
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)
Re:Great, but... (Score:1)
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.
Re:Supercollider? (Score:2)
See Freeman Dyson's book Infinite in all Directions for evidence on how it's often the lower cost science that pays off best.
Re:Left out (Score:1)
Where do I... (Score:1)
signed... The Punch the Monkey Guy
Huh? (Score:1)
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)
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++.ht
Re:Great, but... (Score:2)
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.
Re:Great, but... (Score:2)
Nice specs... (Score:1)
Sounds like a weapon that is available in Quake!
Your Tax Dollars At Work (Score:2)
In this case, the scientific community will probably benefit, but I do wonder what the opportunity cost is...
sulli
What about a webcam? (Score:1)
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...
Take the Tour!!!! (Score:2)
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.
Re:Size over arrays? (Score:2)
Re:Nice specs... (Score:1)
More about GreenBank (Score:2)
- 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).
Give 'em the Byrd (Score:1)
Re:Great, but... (Score:4)
IIRC, there are four NRAO locations, the headquarters in Charlottesville VA and telescopes at Green Bank, Socorro NM, and Tucson AZ
Re:Planets? (Score:1)
imabug
Can't they pass a law..... (Score:1)
I spent a summer in green bank, WV (Score:3)
* 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!
Re:What does this have to do with SETI? (Score:1)
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.
Re:why waste all that money? (Score:1)
Maybe the Illuminatti got to *you* too... I shouldn't trust what I read on /. anymore, they've gotten to everyone!
no microwave? (Score:1)
No microwave?
How do they feed the resident geeks then?
Re:Supercollider? (Score:2)
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.
Re:Supercollider? (Score:1)
Night? (Score:1)
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)
Typical politician? (Score:1)
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
Re:Great, but... (Score:1)
That, plus the National Radio Quiet Zone referred to above, make it actually one of the better places in the country for it.
Metric (Score:2)
Re:What does this have to do with SETI? (Score:1)
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.
Re:What about a webcam? (Score:1)
imabug
Re:Why should a politician get the credit? (Score:1)
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.
Amazing scientific discovery (Score:2)
"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.
--
superexpense? (Score:2)
Re:Supercollider? (Score:1)
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.
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Re:Why should a politician get the credit? (Score:1)
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
Re:How is this going to work? (Score:1)
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]
Re:Nice specs... (Score:2)
Maybe they can get a contract from Motorola for 'deorbiting' the birds...
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Re:Size over arrays? (Score:2)
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.
Re:Amazing scientific discovery (Score:2)
When you've got as much karma as me, the occasional -1 hurts less
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Re:More info :) (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Great, but...(OT) (Score:2)
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
Re:Great, but... (Score:2)
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
VLBI and other applications (Score:2)
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
Re:Why should a politician get the credit? (Score:2)
Check out how he has spent your money:
http://www.political-research.com/ps201/Lecture
And are our politicians overpaid? Not according to the latest law signed a couple of months ago:
http://www.kentuckyconnect.com/heraldleader/new
Huh?!? (Score:2)
What I wonder... (Score:2)
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?
Pictures of the old collapsed one.. (Score:2)