Date: May 27, 2009

Title: Smiley the Little Dish That Could

Podcaster: Christi Whitworth

Organization: Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute www.pari.edu

Description: An introduction to an important teaching tool located at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute. This remotely controlled radio telescope has a colorful history that begs to be told. With a connection to the history of American space exploration and a future leading new scientists into radio astronomy, Smiley is the face of PARI in more ways than one.

Bio: Christi Whitworth is Education Director at Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute. She earned her Master of Arts degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Tennessee Technological University in 1995. She has served as a teacher of the gifted, a middle school science teacher, and an informal science teacher in a children’s science museum and a zoo. Since 2006, Christi has worked at PARI as a science educator. She maintains and creates programming for PARI’s StarLab, Evening at PARI public programs, and other educational outreach programs. She enjoys working with all ages of students.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the equational theorem prover E at www.eprover.org – because everyone needs some logic in their life.

Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to 365 days of astronomy for May 27th, 2009. My name is Christi Whitworth, and I’m education director at Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute.

I want to share with you today the story of an instrument that is very sentimental to us, and to many other people in the Western North Carolina region. Smiley is the unofficial symbol of our observatory and the science education opportunities that we offer.

For many years during the cold war, PARI was a secret hidden deep in the Pisgah National Forest of Western North Carolina. It was a satellite tracking station listening for the tell tale radio signals of orbiting satellites. Some of these satellites belonged to the US, others didn’t. And nestled here between his two larger 26-meter brothers, now known as 26 East and 26 West, was a comparatively tiny little dish, that we call Smiley. He might be called cold war spy equipment with a little attitude. He’s been repurposed today for science education and is now used and enjoyed by school children all over the world.

Smiley is a relatively small radio telescope, only 4.6 meters across. This gives Smiley a relative view of about three degrees of sky. With his antenna receiving 1,420 MHz to detect radio emissions from neutral hydrogen throughout our galaxy, the information gathered by Smiley is relayed to the user in real time via the web site http://smileycontrol.pari.edu/newsmiley/. Users have a user name and a password that allow them full remote control of Smiley. Radio astronomy collects data in the form of numbers. Once it’s collected it can then be analyzed. Smiley provides an excellent training tool for this kind of astronomy. The user gets their own data and they can search the data of other users, because they have access to all the data files. They can create calibration data so they can learn exactly when they’re centered on an object as well as they possibly can. They can use their own or other people’s data to make calculations for things like Doppler shift using the spectral data, or solar flares using continuum data. They can even learn to interpret map data into imagery by using their computer and the graphics.

Because it’s a remotely operated instrument, teachers and students can access it from anywhere the Internet allows. And this connection does give them full control over the instrument in terms of motion and data gathering time. Students learn to plan their observation times for certain objects so they can gather reliable and repeatable data, and from that data they calculate things like the speed and the direction an object is traveling through our galaxy.

But the question we get asked most often at PARI is, “How did the Smiley face get on Smiley?” Smiley’s history reaches back to the early days of American human space flight. Smiley’s big brothers on PARI’s campus were built to maintain daily communication with several instruments that let NASA know what was going on with missions overhead.

In 1974 Smiley, actually was the primary instrument in determining how rainfall affects the ability of a dish to receive communication from orbiting satellites overhead. This data was essential to determining how well ground crews could maintain solid communication links with instruments.

The story of how the smiley face was painted on the front of the dish goes back to the 80’s. During the 1980’s the tracking station was turned over to the Department of Defense and it became primarily devoted to downloading information from orbiting satellites. Because the satellites from other countries could also be detected by these instruments the technicians at the site knew when satellites were passing overhead, and they would report when the ones controlled by other countries were doing this. When the movement became readily apparent or sometimes even predictable, it was assumed they were imaging the site to try and triangulate the positions of US satellites orbiting the earth. These satellites would take images to see the orientation of the 26-meter dishes so they could establish the orbital paths of these other satellites.

One day some of the staff were instructed to paint a smiley face, just two eyes and a mouth, on the dish. Then when a satellite not controlled by the United States was detected, Smiley would be oriented at such an altitude it would present its smiling face up to that satellites camera. These images were downloaded later in other countries, and the folks could see that face as just a friendly, “Hello, we know you’re watching” message.

Eventually someone in the organization decided this wasn’t such a funny joke anymore, and the staff was instructed to remove the face, which they promptly did. But just a little while later, we still don’t know who, but someone higher up in the chain of command noticed the face was missing. They asked about it, and were told it had been removed. The instructions that the face be replaced on the dish soon followed. The face has remained every since and has not been removed again. People got used to it, and PARI uses it as a sort of mascot on stickers and our Twitter site. Today that face delights kids of all ages, every time they rotate that dish toward the web cam, or they drive by our gatehouse as they enter the campus. The smiles it generates are always heartfelt, and it tends to make the science that this instrument can do a little more accessible and a little more friendly than someone might expect from a place that used to be a Department of Defense facility.

On occasion we are lucky enough to be visited by the people who used to work at this site during all of the exciting times. They often check to make sure we kept the face on Smiley because of the good memories it provides, and they are always glad to see the face is still there. But even more, they love to hear the stories that it generates today from students everywhere.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of 365 Days of Astronomy, and we hope you’ll visit our web site to learn a little more about Smiley, and his big brothers.

You can visit us at www.pari.edu, and we hope you visit us soon.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…goodbye.