Listening for cosmic signals at VLA in New Mexico

As we drove across the flat plains of San Agustin, we could see for miles in every direction. Then the antennas of Very Large Array started to appear one by one.

The Very Large Array, or VLA for short, is a radio observatory in New Mexico. The observatory area contains 27 antennas, where each dish has a diameter of 25 meters. They are moved around using rail tracks, which at one point even crosses Route 60.

1 of 27 antennas at Very Large Array observatory.

This site has been featured in several science fiction movies. Most notable is the scene in “Contact” (1997) where Jodie Foster sits on the hood of her car and listens to radio wave transmissions through her headphones.

Unfortunately that iconic scene is quite bogus. Radio astronomers don’t really listen to cosmic signals with audio headphones, the antennas were specifically pointed to get a better shot and the number of dishes were increased by CGI effects.

Taking a closer look.

The scenes at VLA were shot during five days in September 1996, with the “listening” scene actually filmed during heavy rain. But the control room, even though shot on a set, is a near perfect replica of the actual VLA Control Room.

Antenna Assembly Building.

The site can also be seen in Carl Sagan’s 1980 documentary “Cosmos” and several movies such as “2010”, “The Arrival”, “Independence Day” and “Terminator Salvation”.

As astronauts were working on the ISS yesterday, they were 250 miles above the surface. That’s even less than the distance from Gothenburg to Stockholm, and yet they feel so very far away. The biosphere of Earth is incredibly thin from that point of view. Everyone that has ever lived, everyone you’ve ever read about in history books, they all lived and died on this little sphere. It’s all we got, and we are destroying it.

Nobody said it better than the late Carl Sagan:

“Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)