The VLA is an awesome piece of technology. Instead of building larger and larger dishes to receive distant radio frequency energy signals, astronomers figured out in the 1940s that you could build an array of smaller dishes that act in concert. You can "tune" the array by moving the dishes relative to each other (the VLA dishes, 25 feet across each, move on railroad tracks). But the VLA was built in the 1970s on a backbone of analog technology. The upgraded array, when completed in 2012, will be known as the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA). Personally, I would have gone with Very Very Large Array.

Technically, the array isn't adding new dishes, but it is adding ultra-sensitive digital receivers and replacing the wiring between dishes with fiber optics. Most importantly, they're getting a new correlator. The correlator is the supercomputer that takes the signals from each dish and figures out how they fit together. All the new gear should make the EVLA about ten times as awesome as the original VLA, sensitive enough "in principle, to detect a signal as weak as a cell phone call from Jupiter," according to Scientific American. Image by: NRAO/AUI.

"The New Radio Sky." [Scientific American, Sept. 2008]

These composite images, including data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array, give new insight into how stars can appear in a galaxy's backwoods. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is an ultraviolet survey telescope. Its observations, shown here in blue and green, highlight the galaxy's farthest-flung clusters of young stars up to 140,000 light-years from its center. The Very Large Array observations show the radio emission in red. Images by NASA. [Galex]