Kurczy said the National Security Agency (NSA) started to take an interest in the Upper base around the 1980s. “The dish, the (original) intent of it, was to point it at the moon and be able to capture soviet signals as they bounced up from the USSR to the moon and land in that dish in Sugar Grove to learn what the Soviets wanted.” While Green Bank was built in a football shape to listen to galaxies far away, Sugar Grove was built in a bowl to intercept overhead satellite communications.

Navy communicate with ships.īoth sites were built in areas surrounded by mountains, and according to Kurzcy, that was by design. military was developed that at one point helped the U.S. Instead, a smaller scale listening station for the U.S. The initial goal was to monitor the Soviets at the start of the Cold War, but that plan was scrapped due to escalating costs. The book’s authors said the initial plans for Sugar Grove included a telescope much bigger than Green Bank (485 feet) at 600 feet tall. Ultimately, though, Sugar Grove was chosen partly due to its proximity to Washington, D.C. They even suggested Burke’s Garden in Virginia as an initial site for the project. Balser claimed plans for a 600 foot telescope for the military were put in place long before any discussions of a National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Kurczy’s reporting on the construction of the site is backed up by claims in an earlier book ‘But it was Fun: the first forty years of radio astronomy in Green Bank.’ In that book, the authors F.J. In Sugar Grove, it’s about the secret surveillance of all of the texts and emails and phone calls we’re doing every single day.” It is located at another site built thirty miles Northeast of the telescope. Posts will start back up again once I’m back on Monday, but until then enjoy the break from my usual broadcast.“My distaste for this device (cell phone) led me to West Virginia, where there are state and federal laws against using a cell phone and wireless devices in the National Radio Quiet Zone, and at the very heart of it is Green Bank, our country’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory.”īut through his journey, Kurczy learned there is another star on the map in the quiet zone that you wouldn’t find at the Green Bank gift shop. I won’t have access to the web while I’m away, and I don’t have a backlog of posts, so this site will also be entering a kind of radio silence. It’s also where I happen to be heading for the rest of this week. Near the telescopes themselves even digital cameras are too radio loud to be used. In the Zone there’s no cell coverage, no wifi, and limited internet. It’s a 34,000 square kilometer region spanning parts of Virginia and West Virginia. In the United States, a National Radio Quiet Zone was established in 1958 to protect radio telescopes at Green Bank observatory in West Virginia. One solution is to create a radio quiet zone, where the use of radio and microwave technology is severely limited. That’s why we need super-sensitive radio telescopes, and why some radio telescopes need to be protected against stray radio signals. It’s not that mobile phones are generating massive amounts of radio energy, but rather that astronomical radio objects are extraordinarily faint. If a typical mobile phone was placed on the surface of Mars, it would be the brightest radio object in the night sky.

West virginia radio silence zone