* Astronomy

Three new antennas at NASA's White Sands ...
Engineers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md., showcased the new 18-meter Ka Band Antenna Network, the first such system in agency history, during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico on November 8. "Ka band" refers to a section within the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Much like how listeners can't pick up FM waves on AM radios and vice-versa, Ka band signals require special equipment to receive them.

The three new dishes help meet the growing demand for ground stations to handle high volumes of science data generated by today's new satellites. The Ka band system allows satellites to transmit more data to the ground than ever before, in the area of 45 terabytes a month. That's about the equivalent of 1,152 fully loaded 40-gigabyte iPods! The dishes are 18.2 meters in diameter, and they need to be able to rotate quickly to acquire satellite signals. To make the dishes lighter they are largely held together with glue, rather than bolts and other fasteners. But this is no ordinary wood glue.

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