Caltech Plans 1,650-Dish Radio Telescope Array Across 123 Square Miles of Nevada Public Land

The California Institute of Technology announced last week that it will proceed with construction of the Deep Synoptic Array, a radio telescope project consisting of 1,650 individual dishes spread across more than 123 square miles in Nevada’s White Pine County. The array will study supermassive black holes, pulsars, and fast radio bursts. Each dish measures roughly 20 feet across.

The site lies in a remote stretch of the Great Basin managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Gregg Hallinan, a Caltech astronomy professor and principal investigator for the project, said the large number of antennas sets the array apart. “It’s the sheer number of antennas that makes this completely unique and unlike other existing telescopes,” he said.

Hallinan added that once complete the array will survey the sky 100 times faster than other ground-based radio telescopes and produce the highest-quality radio images to date. “Every telescope that has been built in history — and that’s going back a century — combined has found about 20 million radio sources,” Hallinan said.

” Vikram Ravi, a Caltech astronomy professor and co-principal investigator, said in a statement that radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph.

Researchers plan to conduct at least five sky surveys with the array, pinpointing radio sources for follow-up observations by optical, infrared, and X-ray telescopes. The project is currently in the permitting process. Hallinan said construction could begin next year, with completion targeted for 2029.

Two prototype dishes were recently built near Bishop, California, as a technology demonstration. Funding came from Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic organization created in 2024 by Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy. Schmidt became CEO of Relativity Space last year; the company won a NASA contract this week to deliver science instruments to Mars in 2028.