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The University of New Mexico

NEWS RELEASE



Media Contact: Karen Wentworth (505) 277-5627

kwent2@unm.edu

July 10, 2007

UNM Announces Lee J. Rickard is New Executive Director for Long Wavelength Array

Astrophysicist Lee J Rickard will direct the assembly and testing of the Long Wavelength Array for the University of New Mexico. Rickard is following up on work he did while with the Remote Sensing Division of the Naval Research Laboratory at the Very Large Array near Socorro in the early 1990’s. At that time his research group was working to determine whether the “noise” in the ionosphere could be filtered out well enough to do productive research in the lower frequencies of the radio spectrum. Initial results showed it probably can and a new area of scientific research began.

The first instrument in the project, called the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array, is already operating at the VLA. Working with Greg Taylor and a team from UNM, Rickard is currently searching for locations throughout southeastern New Mexico where he can build the next 16 instruments. He and other researchers involved in the Southwest Consortium, which includes UNM, the University of Texas at Austin, the Naval Research Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Virginia Tech, are also reviewing readings from the first instrument and looking for ways to improve results.

The LWA will focus on sensing radio waves in the10 – 80 MHz range that pass through the ionosphere; the electrically charged layer at the outer edge of the earth’s atmosphere. Researchers hope to recover data on the structure and ‘weather’ in the ionosphere, which is needed for commercial and defense communications and navigation systems.

The LWA will have several jobs as a radio telescope. Researchers will use it to search for the faint and distant traces from the beginning of the universe; to study the distribution of cosmic rays in the Milky Way Galaxy. The system is also so flexible it will allow them to search for transient objects such as gamma ray bursts and study the effects of solar and space weather on the earth.

This project is a gateway for undergraduate and graduate students to actually help build and use a major astronomical instrument. Ricard says “the kind of electronics we put on the antennas and use for receivers are the sorts of things that students can put together in a laboratory. So what we are looking at is an opportunity to do radio astronomy in a way that students can get a lot more engagement than they can with the big facilities.”

There is more information available about the project at http://www.phys.unm.edu/~lwa/s_drivers_smmry.shtml

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