The Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA), part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), took a giant step toward completion on August 7 with successful testing of advanced digital hardware designed to combine signals from its upgraded radio-telescope antennas to produce high resolution images of celestial objects.
An international effort is now underway to upgrade the world's giant radio telescopes with 21st century technology. The improvements will increase their sensitivity up to 10 times, opening up whole new heavenly realms. At the same time, new and more specialized radio telescope arrays are being built to peer into the universe's earliest star-forming era.
An international project to make the world's most productive ground-based telescope 10 times more capable has reached its halfway mark and is on schedule to provide astronomers with an extremely powerful new tool for exploring the Universe. The National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope now has half of its giant, 230-ton dish antennas converted to use new, state-of-the-art digital electronics to replace analogue equipment that has served since the facility's construction during the 1970s.