WHITE PINE COUNTY — The California Institute of Technology announced it is proceeding with construction of the Deep Synoptic Array radio telescope project after securing funding from Schmidt Sciences. The array will be located in Nevada's White Pine County.

The project is currently in the permitting process. Construction could begin next year, with a goal to complete the project by 2029. The Deep Synoptic Array will consist of 1,650 individual radio dishes, each measuring roughly 20 feet across, and is expected to span more than 123 square miles. The site is in an area managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

Gregg Hallinan, a professor of astronomy at Caltech and a principal investigator for the project, said, "It's the sheer number of antennas that makes this completely unique and unlike other existing telescopes." He added that once built, the array will outperform all other ground-based radio telescopes that came before it, surveying the sky 100 times faster and producing the highest-quality radio images to date. "Every telescope that has been built in history — and that's going back a century — combined has found about 20 million radio sources," Hallinan said. "That's how many radio sources we know of in the universe. This telescope will double that in the first 24 hours."

The Deep Synoptic Array will study supermassive black holes, pulsars, and fast radio bursts. Vikram Ravi, a professor of astronomy at Caltech and a co-principal investigator, said, "The DSA is looking at a far larger volume of the universe far more often than any other telescope." Ravi added, "Radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph." Researchers plan to conduct at least five sky surveys using the array. Hallinan said, "We'll be able to say precisely where in the sky we detected the radio source, and then all these other telescopes — optical, infrared and X-ray observatories — can point there."

Funding for the project came from Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic organization created in 2024 by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and his wife, Wendy. Two prototype dishes for the array were constructed near Bishop, California, and serve as a technology demonstration. Project leaders surveyed sites across California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah to find a location. Hallinan explained that ideal locations for radio telescope projects are remote to avoid radio frequency interference. "This telescope is sensitive enough to detect a cellphone as far away as the sun," Hallinan said, "so we need to try to get away from all that." He noted that the Great Basin in Nevada offers a natural shield against such interference. "There are these quiet valleys that are also very low in population," Hallinan said. "This location in White Pine County was by far the quietest that we found, and it was just incredibly well-suited for radio astronomy."