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Location of Telescopes with NIST Technology
North America
- Airborne Lunar Spectral Irradiance (air-LUSI) Instrument
Flown on NASA’s ER-2 aircraft, a high-altitude aircraft based at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California - Arizona Radio Observatory
Kitt Peak, Arizona - Hobby-Eberly Telescope
McDonald Observatory, near Fort Davis, Texas - James Clerk Maxwell Telescope
Mauna Kea, Hawaii - Large Millimeter Telescope
Sierra Negra, Mexico - Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)
Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington - Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope
Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia - Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA)
A Boeing 747SP aircraft, modified to carry a telescope and cameras. Operated and maintained by NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California. - WIYN Telescope
Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona
South Pole/Antartica
- Balloon-Borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: The Next Generation (BLAST-TNG)
A stratospheric balloon experiment launched from Antarctica - BICEP and KECK Array
Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station - South Pole Telescope
Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica - SPIDER
Balloon experiment launched from Antarctica
South America
- Atacama Cosmology Telescope
Atacama Desert in Chile - Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS)
Atacama Desert in Chile - Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope
Cerro Chajnantor, Chile - NIST Stars
Cerro Paranal, Chile - Simons Array/POLARBEAR
James Ax Observatory at Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert, Chile - Simons Observatory
Atacama Desert in Chile
Asia
- Ali CMB Polarization Telescope (AliCPT)
Tibet, China
Space
Created October 18, 2021, Updated February 17, 2026