Most Sensitive Radio Telescope to Rise in Nevada Desert
A remote valley in Nevada’s Great Basin desert is set to become home to the most sensitive radio telescope array ever constructed, a $200 million project that promises to revolutionize humanity’s understanding of the universe by detecting over one billion new cosmic radio sources.
The California Institute of Technology announced this month that it is moving forward with construction of the Deep Synoptic Array (DSA) after securing funding from Schmidt Sciences, the philanthropic organization of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy. The array will consist of 1,650 steerable parabolic antennas spread across approximately 123 square miles in Spring Valley, White Pine County, Nevada.
A Quantum Leap in Radio Astronomy
Once completed in 2029, the DSA will survey the sky 100 times faster than any existing radio telescope and produce the highest-quality radio images ever captured. Its collecting area of roughly 49,000 square meters is comparable to that of the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory, but its vast number of dishes gives it unprecedented capabilities.
“Every telescope that has been built in history — and that’s going back a century — combined has found about 20 million radio sources,” said Gregg Hallinan, principal investigator of the DSA and professor of astronomy at Caltech. “This telescope will double that in the first 24 hours.”
According to Caltech’s official announcement, the DSA will detect and localize more than 100,000 fast radio bursts (FRBs), discover over 20,000 new pulsars, and contribute to the study of dark energy, neutrino mass, and gravitational waves.
Engineering Marvels
The DSA’s most significant innovation is its “radio camera” — a real-time imaging system that eliminates the data storage crisis that has long plagued radio astronomy. With 1,650 dishes achieving near-complete sampling of the spatial frequency plane, data can be processed instantly rather than requiring months of post-processing. This reduces storage requirements from an estimated 100 exabytes to approximately one petabyte per year.
“Without the radio camera, we would have to store 100 exabytes of data to complete our survey,” Hallinan explained. “This would require 5 million hard drives in a multi-billion-dollar facility the size of multiple football fields.”
The project also features several cost-saving breakthroughs. Caltech radio astronomer Sandy Weinreb developed new indium phosphide-based amplifiers that achieve sufficiently low noise at room temperature, eliminating the need for expensive cryogenic cooling systems on each dish. In an unusual manufacturing partnership, the company Fat Daddio’s modified its standard metal cake pans to serve as components of the antenna feed horns.
Why Nevada?
The search for the ideal location spanned California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The DSA’s sensitivity is so extraordinary that Hallinan noted it could “detect a cellphone as far away as the sun,” making radio frequency interference a critical concern.
“There are these quiet valleys that are also very low in population,” Hallinan said. “This location in White Pine County was by far the quietest that we found, and it was just incredibly well-suited for radio astronomy.”
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the site, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, offers natural shielding from interference thanks to surrounding mountain ranges, along with high elevation and existing infrastructure.
Scientific Goals and Public Access
Vikram Ravi, co-principal investigator of the DSA, described the transformation the array will bring: “Radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph. The DSA is looking at a far larger volume of the universe far more often than any other telescope.”
Beyond its primary five-year sky survey, the DSA will serve as the radio counterpart to optical observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. A parallel system called the Chronoscope will search the sky at 1,000 frames per second for transient phenomena.
Crucially, all data from the DSA will be publicly available with no proprietary period. “We want the whole world to also have access to the data just as quickly as we do,” said Katie Jameson, the DSA lead project manager. “Everyone will be able to probe the wonders of the radio universe right after the data are collected.”
What’s Next
Construction is expected to begin in 2027, pending permitting from the Bureau of Land Management, with completion targeted for 2029. The project represents a growing trend of philanthropic funding for large-scale scientific infrastructure, following a pathfinder phase that included the NSF-funded DSA-110 and OVRO Long Wavelength Array prototypes.
Hallinan summed up the potential: “The science that can be done is endless. There will be enough discoveries to occupy every radio astronomer on the planet. With fully public, science-ready data, some of these discoveries may even be made by a high-school student with a clever idea. The radio sky is the limit!”