Caltech’s 1,650‑Dish Array Will Scan the Sky in Real Time, Unveiling a Billion New Radio Sources

Set for completion around 2029, the Deep Synoptic Array (DSA) will consist of 1,650 dishes, each just under 20 feet in diameter, arranged over a 12‑by‑10‑mile expanse in a remote Nevada desert basin.

By contrast, New Mexico’s Very Large Array—one of the largest existing radio facilities—operates with only 27 antennas.

Large ensembles of modest‑sized dishes sharpen spatial resolution by acting as a single, gigantic instrument, yet they generally lack the raw sensitivity of a solitary large dish, restricting them to bright targets such as pulsars and fast radio bursts.

To minimize radio‑frequency interference—unwanted electromagnetic “noise” that has troubled astronomers for decades—the site was chosen deep in a Nevada desert valley near Great Basin National Park.

Project leaders assert that the DSA will outpace existing arrays in sensitivity while dramatically accelerating the survey of wide sky regions.

“During its first half‑decade the DSA will repeatedly map the entire accessible sky at unprecedented pace,” said Caltech astronomy professor and DSA principal investigator Gregg Hallinan in a statement. “Where existing radio facilities have catalogued roughly 20 million sources, the DSA will achieve that count within a single day of operation.”

He added that the initial survey is projected to uncover about one billion new radio emitters.

The consortium hopes to exploit the array to investigate mysterious phenomena such as fast radio bursts and to address broader questions like how dark energy shapes cosmic expansion.

“Radio astronomy is about to transition from rough sketches to full‑frame images,” noted DSA co‑principal investigator and Caltech professor Vikram Ravi.

The rapid data flow will enable near‑real‑time processing, and the dataset will be openly available from day one.

“Our goal is to make the observations as promptly accessible to the global community as they are to us,” explained DSA lead project manager Katie Jameson. “Think of the array as a photo lab that develops radio pictures on the fly for anyone to use.”

To keep costs low, the team turned to Fat Daddio’s—a company that normally manufactures bakery pans—to produce thousands of metal trays that serve as receivers for incoming radio waves.

“The work is fundamentally metal‑working, an area where Fat Daddio’s has considerable expertise,” said lead project engineer Francois Kapp.