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Name That Old/New Radio Telescope If You Will

The most famous radio telescope in the world is about to get a new name. The Very Large Array, known around the world, isn't what it used to be. More than a decade of effort has replaced the original, 1970s-vintage electronics with modern, state-of-the-art equipment. The result is a completely new scientific facility.

The VLA Radio Telescope:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0205/vla006_nrao.jpg

Construction on the Expansion Project began in 2001, and completion is scheduled for next year. The project replaced the 1970s-vintage electronic equipment, analog data-transmission system, and the central, special-purpose computing "heart" of the system with state-of-the-art electronics, an all-digital, high-bandwidth data-transmission system, and a new, super-fast central supercomputer with an innovative design that revolutionizes scientists' ability to optimize their observations and exquisitely analyze their results.

The new system is more than ten times more sensitive to faint radio emissions from distant astronomical objects than the original system, and covers more than three times more radio frequencies. The new receiving systems would be capable of detecting the weak radio signal from a cell phone at the distance of Jupiter, a half-billion miles away. As the project progressed, the VLA began to be called the Expanded Very Large Array or EVLA.

To date, more than 2,500 scientists from around the world have used the VLA for more than 13,000 observing projects spanning the range of astronomical specialties from our own Solar System to the edge of the observable Universe, billions of light-years away. And the future is even more exciting.

And so it's time, the Observatory has decided, to give this transformed scientific facility a new name to reflect its new capabilities.

An entry form for submitting name suggestions, along with rules, are online: http://namethearray.org/

Entries will be accepted until December 1, 2011, and the new name will be announced at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Town Hall at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas, in January.

A Contest for Kids, Grandkids and some older “If I Only Had a Brain” Kids
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=34950