The Planet Hunting Machine
From Alta: Sometime in the next decade, NASA hopes to deploy a rover to the dark side of the moon, where it will roll out 128 small, lightweight radio antennae in a flower configuration over 100 square kilometers of the lunar dirt. The FARSIDE project is designed to look for habitable planets in other solar systems.
But you can see it today, already in operation, here in California.
The Cosmic Dawn is happening again, so get your pressure suit on. To look for life 鈥渙ut there,鈥 go visit Gregg Hallinan. He鈥檚 a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. And with about $70 worth of unleaded gas, you can drive from anywhere in the Golden State to his crisp-white shipping container in the Owens Valley and take a gander outside our solar system.
The Owens Valley is a spectacle of nature, and even more beautiful for being in the middle of nowhere. The Mammoth Mountain ski area looks down on it from the northwest. The 4,000-year-old bristlecone pines of the White Mountains do the same from the east. Los Angeles, to the south, still owns the valley floor, in order to suck the water its way (鈥淔orget it, Jake. It鈥檚 Chinatown鈥). Locals from Bishop and Big Pine brag of the golden trout they catch in the rivers. It鈥檚 high desert, a xerophytic ecosystem fed by bajadas and alluvial fans that sprout next to nothing鈥攂itterbrush, burrobush, buckwheat, creosote, and the occasional lizard or jackrabbit.
There鈥檚 a certain early-space-era design aesthetic that takes the breath away when you see it up close. At Caltech鈥檚 observatory in the Owens Valley, the 40 Meter radio telescope triggers that type of 鈥渄rink your Tang鈥 awe. The locals call it Big Ears. Nearly a million pounds of steel tubing and 14,000 square feet of aluminum paneling slathered in 1.5 tons of NASA-white paint can鈥檛 help but give you a 130-foot heartbeat. The 40 Meter has been in Hollywood films. It鈥檚 got movie star presence. Twice a week, it checks on about 1,800 blazars, which are jets of radioactive matter shooting at us from black holes. It has been the celebrity here for half a century. 鈥淭he 40 Meter scope could pick up a cell phone on Pluto,鈥 Mark Hodges, an OVRO design engineer, tells me.