The list of superlatives of this piece of technology is almost as massive as the thing itself, which is currently the world’s largest fully-steerable radio telescope and consequently the largest moving land-based object in the world. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, was built in 2000. The current dish, officially the Robert C. The original main dish served from 1962 until it collapsed in 1988. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Green Bank site, located in the western third of the Zone, has been the home of a number of telescopes over the years. The area was also sufficiently rural and difficult to reach that it was expected to not suddenly share in the post-war boom in development even in the 1950s, the suburbs could be noisy RF environments. Nestled in the Allegheny Mountains, the area was selected for a national radio astronomy program first for its proximity to Washington, but also for the possibility of using terrain shielding to protect the yet-to-be-built antennas from stray RF interference. Finding a convenient place to build that infrastructure that was not subject to a lot of interference was an imperative.Įstablished in 1958 by the FCC, the NRQZ is a rough rectangle of land about 110 miles by 120 miles, straddling the border between Virginia and West Virginia and just barely touching the western tip of Maryland. Playing catch-up involved building all the infrastructure needed to support a space-faring culture, and radio astronomy was a big part of those early efforts. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and started the Space Race, the US was far behind and knew it. Like so many aspects of our contemporary technological life, the NRQZ can trace its roots all the way back to the Cold War era. Who’s listening to what and why are a fascinating part of this story, as are the steps that are taken to keep this area as electromagnetically quiet as possible. That’s the reason for the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile electromagnetic safe-zone in the woods west of Washington DC. But on the EM spectrum, most forests are nearly as noisy as your average cube farm, and that turns out to be a huge problem if you happen to run exquisitely sensitive radio receivers. And while the woods can be a raucous place between the wildlife and the human visitors, it is indeed a world apart from a busy city street, at least in the audio frequencies.
It is divided into 5 zones with increasingly strict restrictions the closer one comes to the telescope.Ask a hundred people why they like to escape to the forest and you’ll probably get a hundred reasons, but chances are good that more than a few will say they seek the peace and quiet of the woods. The NRQZ is a 13,000 square mile region in which radio transmissions are heavily restricted to protect the radio telescope from interference. For additional protection, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created the National Radio Quiet Zone ( NRQZ) in 1958. Nestled between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountain ranges, Green Bank is naturally shielded from many radio waves. A remote location far away from radio transmissions was a necessity and Green Bank, West Virginia was the perfect location. Think of it like someone yelling right next to your parabolic microphone while you try to record a distant bird.Īlthough the Green Bank Telescope was built before the invention of cellphones (1956), radios existed and posed a threat to the device. If a cellphone was used near a radio telescope, it would completely distort the signal from space. The radio waves observed by the Green Bank Telescope are over a billion times weaker than radio waves emitted by a cellphone.