NEW MEXICO
Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
As I approached the VLA, I wasn't sure about how close I could get to it. It is not exactly a tourist attraction, and I was told that you could only see it from the highway, so when I actually saw a "visitor's center" sign I was pretty excited. There is a self-guided tour you can take, which includes a couple of documentaries about the VLA itself and radio astronomy in general. From inside the visitor's building, a path leads you to a single antenna, that is separated form the rest of the array (my guess is it is used as a monitor, for control purposes) but you're not supposed to get close to the array itself -unfortunately, I didn't see that sign- but as long as you don't carry any radio-emitting devices with you there isn't any harm in getting a bit closer.
Being next to the array is really something. Gleaming white against the deep blue New Mexico sky, each antenna is a massive behemot -all twenty seven of them, standing in the middle of the desert. There is virtually no other sign of civilization as far as the eye can see, which only adds to the effect.
When the array turns to point at a new source, first you hear a massive "crack" sound, followed by the collective sound of the motors turning the dishes. It doesn't sound loud, -but it certainly sounds big. And that is just the soundtrack of the show; try to picture all those massive dishes, spread over a significant area, turning in perfect synch like some olympian ballet -it's simply awesome.
Now when you are in a physical setting like this, it isn't hard to think big -or feel big. The emotion is difficult to explain. I watched the antennae pointed at the sky, reaching so incredible far away, listening, discovering, learning... and I could almost see our ancestors back at the dawn of prehistory, looking up at the sky, curious, wondering, baffled, -yet hopeful, trying to make sense of it all. By God, how very far we have come! How much we've accomplished... and how very far yet to go. It becomes plain to see how much of who we are is in our curiosity, how our thirst for knowledge has brought us so far since those early days. Being in a place like this makes you realize how lucky we are to live in a time when we have the resources to make something like this, to indulge our curiosity, to pursue pure science. -We could only wish all public money was spent so wisely. It is a curious feeling too; because the signals received by the array are so tiny, so ethereal, and the knowledge they carry so seemingly abstract, so distant in space and time, so far removed from everyday human affairs. And yet the tools to gather it are so massive and real. But that is just an illusion, because the knowledge gained is very real indeed. Observations made with this array have provided enormous amounts of hard data, and helped answer many questions, from graviational lenses to pulsars, its scientific contributions since it was built have been numerous; and advances in computer technology have increased its yield by orders of magnitude since it was innagurated in 1980.
And a little annecdote. The control room -where the VLA is operated- was out of bounds. I really wanted to see the nerve center of the VLA, but I resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't get to see it. Well, it turns out that I had locked myself out of my car. So I had no choice but to find someone and ask for help. It was pretty late at that point, and everybody was gone and the doors locked. It was my luck that I run into a maintenance person, who in turn took me to the only other person working in the facilities. Guess, who? The operator in the control room :-) So after unsuccesfully tying to find some tool to unlock my car, I made a call to AAA, and waited for them in the control room. I did loose about three hours -I was lucky the AAA sent someone there at all- but I managed to see the contol room -it was a tad disappointing, the computers and software were pretty ordinary, but I did see some mementos from the filming of "Contact", including an autographed portrait of Jodi Foster, and some addtional facts about the VLA -IE: did you know that it only takes one person to operate the array?
[Aerial View of the Very Large Array]
[The Other Famous, Giant, Radio Telescope]