The Telescope Array Project: A Photo Tour

The Cosmic Ray Center’s visitor center provides a look at the art and science of cosmic rays.

The visitor center also hosts a memorial of a Japanese internment camp that was located not far from where the center is today.

Through the visitor’s center is a back room used mostly for storage, shown here. Further ahead is where the science gets done.

Inside the building, two TA detectors sit in various states of assembly. The detectors contain light-sensitive equipment, so while they are under construction, they must be covered or sealed inside a box.

Julie Callahan, who works for the University of Utah and does outreach for TA, demonstrates the handles that are used to open the large panels on top of the detectors. The heavy panels require at least two people to lift each one.

A glimpse of the electronics within one of the detectors.

The completed detectors are moved from the building into a muddy corral out back. They will remain here until they’re transported part of the way to their final positions across the desert floor. The detectors are placed around a location 45 minutes from Delta, and are separated by as much as three-quarters of a mile (1,200 meters).

A local contractor uses a skid lift to load the detectors onto the trailer.

A few of the wires that keep birds from resting on the detectors came loose and needed to be reinstalled.

Unloading the detectors from the trailers requires a crane.

One of the detectors is seen here, suspended by a crane.

After transport, scientists check the equipment to make sure it wasn’t damaged. They will do this again after helicopters transport the SDs to their final destination.

Scientists also check the sensitive electronics before operations begin.

A helicopter transports the detectors to their new home, where scientists will check the electronics before leaving them. This image is from the deployment of the first batch of TA detectors.

The sensitive photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) capture and amplify light within the TA project’s fluorescent telescopes. These telescopes look for ultraviolet light in the night sky that is created by cosmic-ray collisions with the atmosphere.

For each mirror, 256 PMTs sit in a box. Light reflects from the mirror to the PMTs, which amplify the signal.

Callahan poses near one of the cloverleaf mirrors used in the fluorescent telescopes that look for flashes of light created when cosmic rays interact with atoms in Earth’s atmosphere.

Fourteen sets of mirrors are part of the Telescope Array, while another 10 make up the Telescope Array Low Energy Extension, an upgrade to the TA that will search for cosmic rays of lower energies.

Robert Cady, an assistant research professor at the University of Utah who is working on the TA experiment, stands near one of the TA telescope mirrors after the sun has gone down.

After the sun sets over the desert, the fluorescent telescopes go to work.