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ngVLA progresses with prototype construction
from Contact 17
BY MATTHEW TAYLOR (SKAO)
The US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) has celebrated the lifting of its first Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) prototype dish onto its pedestal. The ngVLA will be complementary to the SKAO’s own telescopes, covering frequencies at the high end of, and above, those observed by SKA-Mid.
The original VLA is an SKA pathfinder, and the new prototype is the first dish constructed at the site in New Mexico for around 25 years.
“We’re very, very pleased – this was a milestone for us,” said NRAO Director Prof. Tony Beasley during a visit to SKAO Global HQ in the UK, where he updated staff on the latest progress.
“We’ll be building 244 antennas as part of ngVLA. We’ve been very fortunate that the National Science Foundation has funded us to do the basic development work and to build this prototype antenna.”
Engineering tests on the dish will be followed in a few months’ time by scientific testing, scheduled to take six to 12 months.
“There are plans to build another prototype, possibly in Green Bank, and there are a couple of adjacent projects that are interested in building some of these antennas. So it represented the start of several efforts,” Prof. Beasley said.
In 2023, the joint SKA-ngVLA science meeting in Vancouver focused on how the telescopes would complement each other, something Prof. Beasley also highlighted during his visit.
“The ngVLA sits in the [frequency] region between ALMA and the SKA telescopes. A lot of the science cases we’re interested in are anywhere between five and 120 Ghz. Together all of these instruments present an arsenal of astronomical tools that can be used to look at different problems.”
