The Precision Engineering Division of the Central Development Lab designs and tests receiver hardware for all of NRAO’s telescopes and for cutting-edge receivers used by customers around the world.
Engineering at the Speed of Light
Christophe Jacques, an engineer at the NRAO Technology Center in Virginia, specializes in high-frequency data transmission. He worked in the Local Oscillator group to build and test the unique timing devices that allow ALMA’s high frequency data to be combined by supercomputer.
Experts in Receiver Technology
Francoise Johnson and Sivasankaran Srikanth are engineers at the Central Development Laboratory in Charlottesville. They invent, design, and build the state-of-the-art receiver technologies used in our telescopes around the world.
Moonrise Over the OSF
The upper deck of the testing range at the ALMA Operations Support Facility in northern Chile. Two North American 12-meter antennas observe together while a Japanese 12-meter antenna awaits commands.
Filming the ALMA Documentary
In 2011, a film crew visited the ALMA site in northern Chile to document the building of the world’s most powerful millimeter-wave telescope array. Here they are filming ALMA staff working on one of the North American 12-meter antennas at the Operations Support Facility.
Turret of Tools
This is the packed tooling turret for the milling center in the Green Bank machine shop in West Virginia. Tools are slot into this turret and when the job needs a different tool, the machine can get it, put it in the spindle itself and calibrate it.