2025 SARA Western Conference - Socorro, New Mexico, USA
The 2025 SARA Western Conference will be held at the Pete V. Domenici Science Operations Center in Socorro, NM and the Very Large Array near Magdalena, New Mexico on March 14 to 16, 2025.
The town of Socorro is the home of NRAO operations in New Mexico (NM). Located on the campus of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech), the Pete V. Domenici Science Operations Center houses scientific, engineering, technical, computer and support staff for both the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The Science Operations Center also houses the control center and correlator for VLBA observations and hosts personnel working on the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) project.
We will have a tour of the Very Large Array (VLA) site west of Socorro. We will also tour the Long Wavelength Array (LWA) ( http://lwa.unm.edu ) which is next to the VLA. In addition to presentations by SARA members, we plan to have presentations by speakers from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Array Operations Center (NRAO AOC) in Socorro. Additional details will be published online and in the SARA journal as we get closer to the conference date. Register now to avoid the rush and to guarantee a seat at the conference.
VLA site tour: The Very Large Array consists of 27 parabolic dish reflector antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin approximately fifty miles west of Socorro: http://www.vla.nrao.edu/ . Each antenna is 25 m in diameter.
LWA site tour: The Long Wavelength Array (256 bent dipole antennas) LWA-1 is located next to the VLA There are three LWAs in New Mexico, two in the vicinity of the VLA and one north of Socorro in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge. Each array consists of 256 crossed-dipole antennas and each antenna is about 1.5 m high.
Hotel
(575) 838-0556 Best Western (Socorro, NM).
SARA Western Conference (group name)
The "drop date" for all unused rooms is 2 weeks prior to arrival date
At this time, we only have 10 rooms reserved.
Ken Redcap
Western Conference Coordinator
