Hillsdale College Students Revive Radio Telescope at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory
The telescope is identical to one students constructed on Hillsdale’s campus.
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Three students in Hillsdale College’s LAUREATES program revived a radio telescope at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia this summer. The telescope, a station of the Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor, detects radio waves at frequencies just below the FM band from the National Radio Quiet Zone.
“This telescope, identical to our own radio telescope in Hayden Park, was the design we originally used in collaboration with our colleagues from The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley,” said Timothy Dolch, associate professor of physics. “Now we have a network of telescopes that we can use together, and with which we can take data simultaneously. This helps to prevent confusion with human-made radio frequency interference.”
“This telescope, identical to our own radio telescope in Hayden Park, was the design we originally used in collaboration with our colleagues from The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.”
Thomas Holm ’28, Ben Bassett ’27, and Jesse Ingalsbe ’28, along with Dolch, spent five nights at the observatory working on the project. Peter Stokes ’27 worked on the data processing remotely.
The NSF Green Bank Observatory’s radio telescopes record radio waves, which have a lower frequency than visible light. The telescope the students worked on is a station of the Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor, a network of five radio telescopes across the country. In 2018, Hillsdale students constructed an identical radio telescope in the College’s Hayden Park as the fifth station in the network. The stations collaborate to detect solar radio bursts and other astrophysical phenomena invisible with an optical telescope.
Ahead of the 2024 total solar eclipse, students in the LAUREATES program also made several trips with Dolch to Observatory Park, Ohio, to construct a radio telescope there. They used this Deployable Low-Band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (DLITE) radio telescope to take solar measurements from within the path of totality.
Hillsdale’s LAUREATES program is an endowed program to support original summer research projects in the sciences. Students undertake high-level research projects under the direction of a faculty mentor. They typically conduct six weeks of full-time research in the early part of the summer, which they integrate into their senior theses the following academic year. Some students also give off-campus presentations at regional or national conferences.