June 16, 2026 - 5:16 pm

A California university plans to build more than 1,600 radio dishes in a remote Nevada desert to scan the sky for radio signals from stars, galaxies, black holes and other mysteries of space.

The cluster of 1,650 dishes, each about 20 feet in diameter, will comprise the Deep Synoptic Array project, touted as the “World’s Most Sensitive Radio Telescope.”

Led by the California Institute of Technology, the endeavor is being funded by the Schmidt Sciences philanthropic foundation. Caltech announced Thursday that the foundation had greenlit its design, with full completion estimated by 2029 and science operations starting soon after.

The university could not be reached for comment, although Physics Today reported in August that the project was planned for a remote Nevada town about an hour’s drive from Ely. The publication added that construction was expected to cost about $200 million.

The science of scanning radio waves in space, which are many times lengthier than visible light, is known as radio astronomy. Caltech is a pioneer in the field.

The DSA project will survey the visible sky at unprecedented speeds, said Gregg Hallinan, program leader and Caltech astronomy professor, in a statement.

“While all other radio telescopes combined have so far found about 20 million radio sources, the DSA will match that in the first day of operations,” said Hallinan, who also is the director of the university’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory. “By the end of its initial survey, it will have discovered about 1 billion new radio sources.”

Vikram Ravi, co-principal investigator of the DSA and Caltech astronomy professor, said that the project will propel the science from “sketch to photograph.”

Caltech said the vast number of dishes will allow images to be processed in real time, saving electronic storage space. The dishes will be housed within an area of roughly 123 square miles.

“Whereas other radio telescopes typically take up to months for their data to be processed and turned into images, the DSA’s numerous radio dishes will feed into a supercomputer that creates images instantly,” the university said.

The offsite computer will be powered by Nvidia graphic processing chips, the university said.

In a cost-saving effort, dish components were manufactured by Fat Daddio’s, a company that specializes in cake pans.

“It turns out that metal cake pans are the perfect shape to serve as components of the feed, which converts electromagnetic waves to electrical signals,” Caltech said.

Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com.