From 1947 until 1998, AUI was responsible for building and then managing the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), a multi-disciplinary science research center located on Long Island, New York.

In that period, AUI/BNL were responsible for the design, development, construction, and operation of numerous major facilities, the most recent being the National Synchrotron Light Source and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

The Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which were recommended for divestment several years ago, will exit NRAO and become independent facilities known as the Green Bank Observatory (GBO), with Karen O'Neill as its director, and the Long Baseline Observatory (LBO), with Walter Brisken as its director.

Pending submission, review, and approval of a supplemental funding request, AUI will continue managing each under a separate cooperative agreement for the next two years, while NSF decides the long-term future of these facilities.

The EVLA will provide a radio telescope of unprecedented sensitivity, resolution, and imaging capability, by modernizing and extending the existing Very Large Array.

The mission of the CDL, headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia, is to support the evolution of NRAO's existing facilities and provide the technology and expertise needed to build the next generation of radio astronomy instruments.

This is accomplished through development of the enabling technologies: low noise amplifiers, millimeter and sub-millimeter detectors, optics and electromagnetic components including feeds and phased arrays, digital signal processing, and new receiver architectures.

CDL staff have developed and produced these critical components and subsystems not only for NRAO's telescopes, but also for the worldwide astronomical community for ground and space-based instruments.

The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) is a continent-wide radio telescope system offering the greatest resolving power of any astronomical instrument operational today.

It is a system of ten identical 25-meter radio-telescope antennas, spread from St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, across the continental United States, to Mauna Kea, Hawaii, working together as a single instrument.

AUI is helping a university-based team that is building a 6-meter, very wide field of view submillimeter telescope, taking advantage of a superb site adjacent to ALMA, at 5600 meters above sea level in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.