AUI Facilities
Atacama Large Millimeter Array
ALMA — The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is a forefront astronomy facility, nearing completion in northern Chile at an altitude of 5,050 meters. Consisting of an 11-mile-wide interferometric imaging array of 54 12-meter dish antennas and a compact array of 12 7-meter antennas, ALMA began early science operations in September 2011. With unprecedented sensitivity, resolution, and imaging capability, ALMA explores the Universe in millimeter- and submillimeter-wavelengths. ALMA is a major international partnership of North America, Europe and East Asia, in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.
The North American ALMA Science Center
NAASC — The North American ALMA Science Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, is the ALMA headquarters for North America. The NAASC supports ALMA science operations in Chile and provides user support for the North American community, including: user website and proposal guides; proposal preparation; post-observation user support; data reduction "cookbooks;" and organization of ALMA meetings/workshops.
Green Bank Telescope
GBT — The Green Bank Telescope (GBT), located in Green Bank, West Virginia, is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope. The telescope's two-acre collecting dish has many novel features, including an unblocked aperture and an active surface, that promise such increased sensitivity to faint radio signals as to usher in a new era of single-dish radio astronomy. The GBT's large aperture provides the high sensitivity required to study pulsars and distortions of the cosmic microwave background; the GBT has detected many organic molecules in interstellar clouds, revealing the molecular building blocks necessary for life.
Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array
VLA — The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, located on the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico, is an exceedingly powerful scientific instrument which has transformed many areas of astronomy, pushing the frontiers of science and knowledge for decades to come. Dedicated in 1980, the VLA consists of 27 antennas arranged in a “Y” pattern, and has been used by more astronomers and has produced more scientific papers than any other radio telescope in the world. The VLA exceeds all other radio astronomy facilities with its combination of sensitivity, flexibility, speed, and overall imaging quality. The VLA has made key observations of black holes and protoplanetary disks around young stars; discovered magnetic filaments and traced complex gas motions at the Milky Way's center; probed the Universe's cosmological parameters; and provided new knowledge about the physical mechanisms that produce radio emission.
Very Long Baseline Array
VLBA — The Very Long Baseline Array is a continent-wide radio telescope system offering the greatest resolving power of any astronomical instrument operational today. It is a system of ten identical radio-telescope antennas, controlled from a common headquarters and working together as a single instrument. The VLBA’s 240-ton dish antennas, each 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter, are spread from St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, across the continental United States, to Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The radio signals received by each individual antenna contribute part of the information used to produce images of celestial objects with hundreds of times more detail than the Hubble Space Telescope images. The VLBA can contribute to any astronomical research where quality, high-resolution radio images will advance knowledge of the field.
NRAO Technology Center
NTC — The scientists and engineers at the NRAO Technology Center in Charlottesville, Virginia perform innovative research to develop necessary instrumentation and processing advances that detect radio waves emitted by astronomical objects. Technology and signal processing developed at the NTC push the state-of-the-art.
Technical innovations developed or enhanced at the NTC for radio astronomy have contributed to improvements in communications antennas, transistors, cryogenic coolers, medical and scientific imaging, time and frequency standards, atomic clocks, and GPS navigation, 911 emergency call location, and precision spacecraft navigation. NRAO technology increases our understanding of the Universe and contributes to American competitiveness.
Central Development Laboratory
CDL — The CDL is located in the NTC building. The mission of the CDL is to support the evolution of NRAO’s existing facilities and to provide the technology and expertise needed to build the next generation of radio astronomy instruments. This is accomplished through development of the enabling technologies: low noise amplifiers, millimeter and sub-millimeter detectors, optics and electromagnetic components including feeds and phased arrays, digital signal processing, and new receiver architectures. The CDL has a long history as a world leader in each of these areas. For many years CDL staff have developed and produced these critical components and subsystems—not only for NRAO’s telescopes, but also for the worldwide astronomical community.
Virtual Astronomical Observatory
The Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) is, by design, coming of age at a time of profound change in the nature of research in astronomy. Data acquisition rates are increasing to petabyte/year levels, and beyond, with archival holdings soon to be measured as tens or hundreds of petabytes, and on to exabytes. Already the research community has hundreds of terabytes of data available online, and there is enormous science potential to be unleashed by the ability to find relevant datasets, access them, compare them quantitatively, and ultimately understand their astrophysical implications. VAO is operated by the VAO LLC, jointly managed by AUI and its sister organization AURA, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.
