Explore the Amazing NRAO Telescopes

As part of the mandate to the Observatory, the NRAO is looking toward the long-range future of radio astronomy, engaging with the broad science and technical community to design the next generation of VLA.

The Very Large Array will survey the entire sky visible taken from their location three times over the next seven years. The survey, VLASS, will provide unprecedented resolution with improved sensitivity and this data will flow directly into the archives to the community to mine for discoveries.

In Green Bank, West Virginia, the Green Bank Observatory’s Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope is the world’s largest, fully-steerable telescope.

Tatel was NRAO’s first telescope, an 85-foot dish built from a kit in 1959.

A 300-foot transit radio telescope operated in Green Bank from 1962 until 1988. It was the world’s largest telescope for many years.

The Green Bank Interferometer is a set of three 85-foot dish antennas that were used together with an outlier as one large telescope.

Since the late 1950s, we have built radio telescopes to detect millimeter waves, the shortest radio waves that reach us through the atmosphere.

Measuring the atmosphere, radio interference, and the radiation from bright radio sources is a critical part of making accurate observations.

We use radio telescopes to study naturally occurring radio light from stars, galaxies, black holes, and other astronomical objects.

The radio signals arriving on Earth from astronomical objects are extremely weak — millions (or billions) of times weaker than the signals used by communication systems.

At today’s observatories, the needs of astronomers for better instruments continue to drive developments in such fields as electronics, mechanical engineering, and computer science.