21 - Owens Valley and Mauna Kea

Summary

Owens Valley Radio Observatory

Edward G. (Taffy) Bowen, head of the Radiophysics Laboratory in Australia, paid a visit to some old wartime friends during a visit to the United States in 1951. These included Lee DuBridge, the president of Caltech, Robert Bacher, head of the physics department at Caltech, Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, and Alfred Loomis, a trustee of both the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation.(1) His discussions with these luminaries of America's scientific establishment tended to focus on the tremendous advances in radio astronomy in Australia and the relatively poor situation of radio astronomy in the United States. So in December 1951 Bacher asked Bowen if he would produce a draft specification for a suitable telescope to get the USA back in the game, whilst shortly afterwards DuBridge asked Bowen to outline the sort of instruments that would be required to build the radio equivalent of the superb optical observatories on Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain. DuBridge wanted Bowen to be the director of the radio observatory with John Bolton as his deputy. But at this stage Bowen was non-committal about his future as he was also interested in building a large radio telescope in Australia.

In August 1952 Bowen wrote to Vannevar Bush to ask whether Carnegie would consider funding both the proposed Caltech radio telescope and a similar instrument in the southern hemisphere as a collaborative development. This eventually resulted in the trustees of the Carnegie Corporation approving funding in May 1954 for what was to become the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia (see Section 16.2). In the meantime, as mentioned in the previous chapter, an interdisciplinary conference had been held in Washington, DC in January 1954, jointly sponsored by the NSF, Caltech and the Carnegie Institution, to discuss the state of radio astronomy in the USA and what to do about it. This eventually resulted in the NSF funding the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, whilst Caltech decided to go it alone and build their own observatory which was largely funded in the early years by the US Office of Naval Research.