Lloyd Berkner was President of Associated Universities, Inc. at the time of NRAO’s funding and founding. He had a wildly successful career in telecommunications with the Bureau of Standards and, later, the Carnegie Institute, with such notable achievements as aiding Byrd’s first voyage to the Antarctic. He was the special assistant to the Secretary of State in 1946. In 1951, he became the first full-time President of AUI. At AUI, he rallied NSF for a national radio astronomy observatory and won. He was acting Director of the new NRAO from its 1956 founding until 1959. He also founded the International Geophysical Year to spur international development of satellite technologies which resulted in the 1957 launch of Sputnik I and the 1958 launch of Explorer I.
Joseph Pawsey
Joseph Pawsey was a founding father of radio astronomy. During WWII, he worked on developing advanced radar instrumentation in Australia at its Radiophysics Laboratory. After the War, the discoveries of radio waves coming from the Sun inspired him to turn post-War instrumentation upwards. He and his team used innovative methods for increasing the resolution of these antennas, including using a cliff-based antenna and its reflection in the sea as a two-element interferometer. Pawsey discovered that sunspots are the sources of non-thermal radio waves from the Sun, and he and his team made a catalog of radio stars, which we now know as radio galaxies. He was appointed Director of NRAO in 1962 but died of a brain tumor before he could take the position.
You Make the Shape
The Green Bank Science Center is home to the 25,000-square foot exhibit hall called “Catching the Wave.” Hands-on experiments like this one show visitors the fascinating reasons why our telescopes are so big, how they work, and what it takes to create images of the Universe from invisible waves.
Making of a Lab
In 1959, site construction in Green Bank, West Virginia was impressive. After a few years of working out of old farm houses, the engineers and astronomers moved into this huge new office and electronics building, later named the Jansky Laboratory.
Gulping Radio Waves
The 13 foot x 17.5 foot aperture end of the 120-foot long Calibration Horn Antenna, otherwise known as the “Little Big Horn,” at Green Bank. It was built in 1959 to observe the sky’s strongest non-solar radio source, Casseopeia A, and measure its total power output at a frequency of 1.4 GHz (L-band, 20cm wavelength). It was also used to map Cas A’s spectrum and take absolute temperature measurements of the background sky.
Receiver Testing Range
These towers in Green Bank are used to test new and serviced receivers. The tower with the small dish sends a signal, and the antenna across from it collects the waves and funnels the signal down onto the test receiver.