Word: dished
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reflector of the world's biggest radio telescope is nothing more than a dish of chicken wire lining a 1,000-ft.-wide hole in the ground. Above it, three tall thin towers poke toward the sky. From the towers' tips, cables string out to suspend a tangle of girders over the center of the bowl. The complete contraption looks like the product of some errant giant playing with an outsize Erector set. But at its dedication in the hills south of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, last week, the great scope was tuned and ready-a sharp and farseeing...
Since the chicken-wire dish is firmly attached to the ground, it cannot be turned mechanically. But by changing the position of the dangling waveguide that feeds radio energy from above, it can be swung electronically 20° north or south of vertical. The rotation of the earth takes care of the east-west steering. Because the telescope's position is only 18° north of the equator, it can reach all the planets, for at that latitude they pass high overhead...
...observations in August, 1956. Since that time the observatory has been recording radiation from the sun 10 hours a day, every day of the year, except for the infrequent interruptions due to failures of the equipment. At 7 a.m. the station automatically turns itself on. A wire parabolic dish, 28 feet in diameter and mounted above the ground on steel legs, begins to follow the sun in its path through the sky. At the focus of this dish a complex antenna system receives the signals from the sun as they are reflected off the wire screen. In the nearby dust...
...antenna has a dish 85 feet in diameter made of giant metal plate rather that simple wire mesh. The massive structure, aptly described as a "moveable bridge" can be pointed at any spot in the sky by throwing a switch in the laboratory which has been constructed nearby. Unlike the sweep-frequency receivers, this instrument can only do observations at 950-megacycles (L-band) and 5,000 megacycles (C-band). No other comparable antenna in the world (and there are few of them) is operating at C-band and so any work which Harvard does at this frequency will...
Later in the summer the new antenna was used to measure the effective temperatures of someof the planets and to map the center of our galaxy at 5,000 megacycles. Operations ended in September, however, because rain water leaked into the equipment at the focus of the giant dish, and caused the receiver to mal-function. Once this equipment is made watertight, work at the station should proceed rapidly. Dr. Maxwells hopes to make extensive studies of individual sources of celestial radiation. With over 100 sources to be examined, the Harvard Radio Astronomy Station will not be idle during...