The Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory is an American astronomical observatory owned and operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO); it is their largest field installation outside of their main site in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is located near Amado, Arizona on the summit, a ridge and at the foot of Mount Hopkins.
Research activities include imaging and spectroscopy of extragalactic, stellar, solar system and extra-solar bodies, as well as gamma-ray and cosmic-ray astronomy.
In 1966, roadwork began on the current site with funding granted for the Smithsonian Mt. Hopkins Observatory. The Whipple 10-meter gamma-ray telescope was constructed in 1968.
Formerly known as the Mount Hopkins Observatory, the observatory was renamed in late 1981 in honor of Fred Lawrence Whipple, a planetary expert, space science pioneer, and director emeritus of SAO, under whose leadership the Arizona facility was established.[citation needed]
Whipple observatory hosts the MMT Observatory, which is jointly run by SAO and the University of Arizona and houses a 6.5-meter telescope. The observatory also has 1.5- and 1.2-meter reflectors and a second 1.3-meter reflector named PAIRITEL (Peters Automated IR Imaging Telescope, ex-2MASS ). Also on site is the HATNet (Hungarian-made Automated Telescope) network, the MEarth Project, and four 0.7-meter telescopes of the automated Miniature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA).
The observatory is known for its pioneering work in ground-based gamma-ray astronomy through the development of the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Technique (IACT) with the Whipple 10-meter Telescope during the early 1980s. The Whipple 10-meter is currently preparing to be decommissioned after forty years of service.
In April 2007, VERITAS (a system of 4 IACT telescopes with 12-meter reflectors) started full operations at the FLWO basecamp. Subsequently, in September 2009, after a 4-month effort, one of the telescopes was moved to a new position, making the array symmetric and increasing its sensitivity.
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