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.
Making Fine Fiber Adjustments
Kenneth Ward, an electronics engineer at Green Bank, examines the ends of fiber cables to make an accurately aligned connection.
Electronics Labs in New Mexico
The entire basement level of the Array Operations Center in Socorro, New Mexico is a huge electronics design and development laboratory. Over a dozen experts in receiver and data signal engineering maintain and innovate our radio telescope technology, making us the world’s premier radio astronomy technology developers.
Dish of the 85-3
85-3 was the third 85-foot telescope kit purchased from the Blaw-Knox Corporation. In 1967, it joined the 85-2 and 85-1, also known as the Howard E. Tatel 85-foot telescope, to expand the NRAO’s first array, the Green Bank Interferometer.
When the GBI was not in use, the 85-3 was used on its own as a pulsar observing tool. From 1989 until 2010, it monitored pulsar timing and brightness for scientists at Princeton, Berkeley, and Oberlin College. About 35 pulsars were observed every day at frequencies of 610 and 327 MHz.