The National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Jansky Very Large Array consists of 27 dish antennas mounted on Y-shaped railroad tracks in the Plains of San Agustin, a dry lake bed between Magdalena and Datil, 50 miles west of Socorro. Each dish is 82 feet across and weighs 230 tons. Each arm of the array is 13 miles long. The radio signals are funneled to cryogenically-cooled receivers and sent down fiber optic cables to a supercomputer which merges them into a single super-telescope image.
Long Wavelength Array: radio telescope for wavelengths between 4m and 15m. The LWA will consists of up to 50 "stations" spaced throughout southwestern New Mexico, an area with very low levels of man-made radio interference. Each "station" consists of 256 individual elements, with LWA-1 located just south of the center of the VLA.
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Last modified 23 June 2016