To the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 1961

Abstract

AbstractRabi to Pawsey 31 October 1961:By 1960, radio astronomy was flourishing in the USA. The pace of development had greatly intensified from 1955 to 1960. Radio astronomy had developed in multiple groups spread across the country, a very different pattern from the single Australian group and the two groups in the UK. By 1957 the universities of California (Berkeley), Cornell, Harvard, Ohio State and Stanford all had active radio astronomy programs. At the Carnegie Institute Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), Franklin and Burke had discovered the intense bursts of radio emission from Jupiter, and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) had made detailed studies of the thermal emission from the moon and the planets using their 50-foot dish. Following the detection of the 21 cm hydrogen line by Ewen and Purcell at Harvard, Bart Bok (Harvard astronomy department) had built up a group of astronomers focussed on the interpretation of observations of the 21 cm hydrogen line. As noted by Kellermann et al. (Open Skies, 2020, p. 54), the Harvard project was managed by astronomers and not by radio scientists as in Australia and the UK. Many of these Harvard graduates were to become members of the NRAO scientific staff, a very different team composition than the instrumentally based groups of radio scientists and engineers that dominated the Australian groups.