Kraus had actually designed a much, much bigger antenna. The Big Ear was big: the flat reflector alone was 33 meters tall and 100 meters wide, and the ground plane stretched 150 meters between the two reflectors. Source: North American Astrophysical Observatory. Although in general the telescope was static and pointed wherever the Earth’s rotation took it, the feedhorn tracking coupled with adjustments to the tilt of the flat reflector gave some control to which part of the sky was being surveyed. At the focal point of the paraboloid reflector was a small shack containing the feed horns, which could move across the width of the telescope on railroad tracks. Between these two elements lay a large, flat ground plane area of aluminum-covered pavement. It consisted of a large, flat reflector section of steel mesh standing across an open space from a wide, stationary paraboloid reflector. The design of the telescope would be extremely simple, especially compared to the more typical fully steerable dish antenna. Kraus first described his idea for a telescope capable of detecting extraterrestrial radio signals in an article for Scientific American in 1955. Kraus was no stranger to big science - during WWII he developed methods for degaussing naval ships to protect them from magnetically detonated mines, and he worked on a massive cyclotron for the University of Michigan.ĭr. Affectionately known as “The Big Ear”, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory was the vision of John D. Understanding the Wow! Signal requires a look at the instrument that produced it. If it was sent from a region of space with habitable planets, it’s at least worth a listen. How we came to hear this signal, what it could possibly mean, and where it might have come from are all interesting details of an event that left a mystery in its wake, one that citizen scientists are now looking into with a fresh perspective. When the data was analyzed later, an astronomer’s marginal exclamation of the extraordinarily powerful but vanishingly brief blip would give the signal its forever name: the Wow! Signal. Shortly after 10:00 PM, the Earth’s rotation slewed the telescope through a powerful radio signal whose passage was noted only by the slight change in tone in the song sung every twelve seconds by the line printer recording that evening’s data. On a balmy August evening in 1977, an enormous radio telescope in a field in the middle of Ohio sat silently listening to the radio universe.
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