Central Development Laboratory
The mission of the CDL is to support the evolution of NRAO’s existing facilities and to provide the technology and expertise needed to build the next generation of radio astronomy instruments. This is accomplished through development of the enabling technologies: low noise amplifiers, millimeter and sub-millimeter detectors, optics and electromagnetic components including feeds and phased arrays, digital signal processing, and new receiver architectures. The CDL has a long history as a world leader in each of these areas. For many years CDL staff have developed and produced these critical components and subsystems—not only for NRAO’s telescopes, but also for the worldwide astronomical community.
In support of the wider U.S. astronomy community, the CDL is collaborating with several organizations on forefront scientific experiments to address fundamental questions described in the Astro2010 decadal survey “New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics”: HERA-PAPER for probing the epoch of reionization, and DARE to look even further back in time—to the formation of the very first stars at the end of the Dark Ages. The CDL enables, through advances in instrumentation, these experiments and next generation facility pathfinders.