Original Correlator for the VLA

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Original Correlator for the VLA

Here is a close-up view of the original correlator for the Very Large Array used from 1979 until 2009. It used over 650 printed circuit cards with 85,000 integrated circuits, and it required 50,000 watts of power. It works as a correlator, performing 1.7 trillion operations a second to combine the waves received by 351 pairs of VLA antennas into a single set of data. The new correlator that replaced this one is 1000 times faster.

Credit: B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

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