A New Beginning

The large increase in frequency coverage resulting from the replacement of the telescope’s reflector surface opened up many new opportunities in the fields of radio and radar astronomy. However, to take advantage of these opportunities new line feeds, especially circularly polarized ones, had to be designed and built and a wide band, multi-channel digital correlator-based spectrometer had also to be designed and built. Radar imaging of Venus with the new 2.38 GHz transmitter required the construction of a 100 ft (30.5 m) auxiliary interferometer antenna and the design and construction of a specialized correlator to “decode” the received radar echoes. Radar observations of Venus in the late 1970s utilizing the new interferometer antenna provided the first large scale image of the surface of Venus and observations of the icy satellites of Jupiter revealed the unusual radar scattering properties of icy surfaces in the solar system. A survey of atomic hydrogen in galaxies in the Pieces-Perseus super cluster of galaxies utilizing the new 1.4 GHz line feed plus a new receiver and a 1008 channel correlator revealed the filamentary structure of the distribution of galaxies in the local universe. In the pulsar area, the first milli-second pulsar was discovered as were the first planets around another star, a neutron star. In atmospheric sciences, a new ionospheric modification transmitting facility was built on the coast just east of Arecibo, a German group initiated a VHF radar program to study the lower ionosphere and the multi-instrument AIDA campaign took place in 1989.