US goverment shutdown switches off radio telescopes
OCT 04, 2013
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.027399
Science : Three radio telescopes in the US are going offline because the ongoing government shutdown has deprived them of operating funds. The shuttered telescopes are the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, which is the world’s most sensitive single-dish radio telescope; the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, a 27-telescope array in New Mexico; and the Very Long Baseline Array, a 10-telescope array in Hawaii that is used for high-resolution observations. A fourth radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, has been spared for now, thanks its international partners, Chile, Europe, and Japan. Mothballing the telescopes is neither cheap nor trivial. Some of their electronic innards require continuous cryogenic cooling. If that fails, the telescopes could be damaged.
© 2013 American Institute of Physics
