Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI
1937
After Karl Jansky’s discovery of radio waves coming from the Milky Way, Grote Reber builds the first parabolic reflecting antenna to be used as a radio telescope.
1951
Ewen and Purcell at Harvard University detect the 21 cm line (1420.4 MHz) emission of the neutral Hydrogen. Their data is confirmed by Dutch astronomers Muller and Oort, and by Christiansen and Hindman in Australia.
1958
Jet Propulsion Laboratory deploys portable radio tracking stations and receives telemetry from Explorer 1, the first successful U.S. satellite. In the same year NASA is officially established.
1960
Frank D. Drake, radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, carries out humanity’s first attempt to detect interstellar radio transmissions: Project Ozma, the foundation for future SETI.
1969
SPIDER is the name of the first LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) to flight in space with astronauts during Apollo 9 mission.
1980
The Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, composed by twenty-seven 25-meter radio telescopes deployed in a Y-shaped array, is inaugurated. It is the largest configuration of radio telescopes in the world.
1993
International Union of Radio Science (URSI) establishes a group to begin a worldwide effort to develop the scientific goals for a next generation radio observatory: the SKA.
2011
China begins construction of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), the world’s largest filled-aperture radio telescope. FAST will have the first light on 2016.
2013
A first in the market, Radio2Space SPIDER 230C is the first turnkey system designed to convert a telescope equatorial mount into a compact radio telescope.
