The two ALMA Transporters rest in their Sun-shelter at the ALMA Operations Support Facility in northern Chile. These giant 28-wheeled trucks lift, power, and haul the telescopes for major servicing or during reconfigurations of the array. The one with the red accents is named Otto, after Otto Rettermaier, the president of Scheuerle, the company that made them. The one with the green assets is Lore, named for his wife.
Inside ALMA’s North American Antenna Assembly
A look inside the Vertex assembly building, the enclosed building where North American ALMA telescopes were assembled. Up to four telescopes were being built simultaneously inside this giant structure in northern Chile.
Inside an ALMA Antenna Base
ALMA engineer Lutz Stenvers examines the cable wrap inside the base of a North American ALMA telescope. The wrap ensures that the power and data cables do not tangle as the telescope quickly dashes to and from radio sources on the sky.
NRAO’s Early Computers
Computer operators Sandy Braun (standing) and IBM employee Mary Jennings in the Charlottesville computer room in 1967. Every day, staff drove here with tapes of telescope data from Green Bank. Handwritten processing programs were transferred to cards using a keypunch. Sandy is feeding the punch cards into the computer. It would return hundreds of pages of data that were checked by eye then sent back to Green Bank. Mary is at the main terminal with a teletype keyboard with printer output — no video terminals in 1967! The computer is an IBM 360 series, and the operating system was known as OS/360; programs were probably written in PL/1 or Fortran.
Computers Come to Green Bank
An impressive sight in the 1960s, a circuit board gets its moment in the spotlight.
Filesharing, the Early Days
Pat Crane, Barry Geldzahler, and Dave Shaffer examine their data in a Green Bank hallway, September 1977.