NRAO Staff Build PAPER Prototype, 2004

"I’ll meet you in your lab tomorrow, and we can get started!" The late Don Backer's comment to Rich Bradley when Backer was in Charlottesville to give the 2003 Jansky Lecture was the start of PAPER - Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization. At their meeting they decided to build portable dual-polarized elements, each equipped with a low noise receiver ensuring sky dominated noise, and planned to build a tiny, four-element linear array in Green Bank within then next few months. Over the winter of 2003-2004 Rich Bradley and his team refined the antenna design and developed a low-noise amplifier to fit into a two-inch diameter cylinder located under the feed point of the antenna. This summer 2004 photo shows the very first antenna used for PAPER being deployed in Green Bank near the 85 foot Tatel Telescope. Rich Bradley is kneeling, Dan Boyd is standing, and N. Biswas, a UVA graduate student at the time, is under the antenna; Don Backer took the photo. PAPER expanded over the years to 128 antennas in South Africa and evolved into the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) radio telescope.

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EoR_8.jpg

2004

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