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8A – Daily News – Wednesday, May 5, 2010 Seeking the universe from an apple orchard in Washington BREWSTER, Wash. (MCT) — Out here by an apple orchard just off High- way 97 is one of the Hubble Space Telescope's ignored cousins, an 82-foot dish painted all white that weighs in at 240 tons. Yet it is part of a tele- scope system that produces images that are hundreds of times more detailed than what the Hubble can do. On its 20th birthday, the Hubble is being honored for the breathtaking cosmic images it has produced. Meanwhile, the ignored cousins — 10 in all, spread from the Caribbean to Brewster to Hawaii, placed in locations away from big- city pollution, and united by computers — are struggling for financing. Ever heard of the VLBA? Probably not, unless you're an astronomy profes- sor or hobbyist. It stands for Very Long Baseline Array, the kind of name a committee of scien- tists would think is very catchy. But this system is so good that it has the ability to see fine detail equivalent to standing in New York City and reading a newspaper in Los Angeles. It peers through clouds and dust into other galaxies, into regions where planets are being formed. It has produced images that go to the very beginnings of the universe, and helped discover a black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Some tourists stop by the dish asking if it has any- thing to do, you know, with the CIA, or maybe listening for extraterrestrials, like in that 1997 Jodie Foster movie, "Contact." No, it doesn't, but a visit Attention Licensed Contractors! The Tehama County Advertising/Enhanced Listing Deadlines Friday, May 14 CONTRACTORS’ GUIDE Distribution in full run of The Daily News Saturday, May 22 Additional single copy distribution through Spring 2011 in county offices, advertisers’ businesses and other locations. Published online on The Daily News’ website as an interactive “page-turn” edition – for a full year. Don’t be left out! Call your Daily News Advertising Representative TODAY 527-2151 D NEWSAILY RED BLUFF TEHAMACOUNTY still is an astounding experi- ence. If you pull up on Monse River Road to the small, windowless, one-story, 45- by-25-foot building where two technicians run the dish, they usually don't mind showing you around. There are no windows in the building for the same reason it's wrapped with a copper mesh in its walls _ to block outside radio interfer- ence that could contaminate the data collected by the dish. The small kitchen area has no microwave because it also might pollute the data. It can get lonely out here by the apple orchard, where a considerable part of the technicians' time is spent, well, waiting. In between the waiting, they need to be able to fix things quickly. Motors need to be replaced, pulleys go out. In the winter, sometimes a crucial part on the outside of the dish ices up, and it can stop moving. "It gets boring at times," says Mark Hoffman, 55, one of the technicians. Sometimes he surfs news websites, or goes outside for some daylight and to feed birds. So a tourist stopping by breaks the monotony. Anyway, says Hoffman, "The taxpayers helped build this. They should be able to see what's going in here." This will be Hoffman's 19th year with the dish, and he'll be taking over $6.00 Hair Cuts I fix Barber Shop New extended hours 8:30am - 6pm Mon-Fri 8am - Noon Saturday Oak Street Every 6th Hair Cut FREE 527-8111 • 335 Oak St. Next door to the State Theatre (Customer parking in Winchell’s parking lot.) blobs and you can't quite tell what the image is trying to tell you." So the astronomers do their best to explain in lay- man's terms why the radio telescopes are important. In comparison to the Hubble, which is estimated to cost $10 billion by the time it dies, the VLBA cost peanuts. MCT photo Mark Hoffman walks on the 82-foot radio telescope dish that listens to outer space and which he maintains by an apple orchard near Brewster in Eastern Washington. the duties of the senior technician, Bob Sander- son, 69, who's retiring in June after 20 years with the dish. Sanderson plans to hike and pursue wood carving. A replacement will be hired, says Hoffman, and that replacement should know, "It's not a very social job. You have to be self- motivated. Our boss is in New Mexico, and we see him only every two or three years." ___ Their boss is at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in Socorro, N.M. The "radio" part in the observatory's name explains why the work of the VLBA hasn't caught the public's imagination, says Professor Bruce Balick of the Univer- sity of Washington's Department of Astronomy. The radio telescope images make visual what humans can't see _ using a bright red, for example, to show a high-intensity radio emission. The radio telescopes can do some- thing that an optical tele- scope can't do _ penetrate the clouds and dust at the core of galaxies and regions when new stars and planets are being formed. "But people don't relate to a radio picture they way they do to an optical image," Balick says. "It all seems abstract. There are no foreground stars, no galaxies roaming about in the background. You just have these color All 10 dishes, the final one completed in 1993, cost $85 million to construct. They cost about $10 million a year to run. The National Science Foundation, which funds the radio dishes, wants help in funding half of that $10 million; some groups have expressed interest. But it's hard to capture the public's imagination with news releases about the groundbreaking work astronomers have done with the VLBA. About as simply as some of the work can be explained is that the VLBA has been used to study the mysterious "Dark Energy" that per- vades the universe, or to study a black hole more than 6 billion times more massive than the sun. For visitors who drop by, Hoffman is a congenial guide, the more outgoing of the two technicians, although he does admit about the research done by the dish, "C384G, the name of some star, somewhere. It doesn't mean that much to me." 8049 Hwy 99E, Los Molinos, CA “Your Family Supermarket” (530) 384-1563 We accept EBT, Credit or Debit 1 DAY MEAT BONANZA May 8, 2010 8:00 am-5:00 pm Beef Tri-Tips (In the Bag) Petite Sirloins (In the Bag) Whole Boneless Pork Loins You’ll save a bundle of cash at this exciting event. Plus lots of other great prices that will SAVE YOU MORE MONEY!! 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