It's an unwritten rule in science that to attract funding for a project or organization, or to promote a scientific technique or relevant software among its users, etc., its name has to condense to a catchy acronym.
People spend serious time thinking about these; I myself have been part of such (formal) brainstorming sessions. Over time I have collected some of the acronyms that stood out to me. Hope you find some of them amusing:
ABRACADABRA: A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus, a project at MIT aimed at detecting Axions.
AMANDA: Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array, a neutrino detector at the South Pole.
AMBER: Astronomical Multi-Beam Recombiner, a telescope.
ATLAS: Australia Telescope Large Area Survey, this is a program.
BICEP: Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.
BLAST: Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope.
BOOMERANG: Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics.
BRAINS: Biobehavioral Research Awards for Innovative New Scientists, an award set up by the National Institute of Mental Health.
BREAD: Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection, a scaled up version of ABRACADABRA.
CANGAROO: Collaboration between Australian and Nippon for a Gamma Ray Observatory.
CAOS: Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.
CIAO: Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics.
EGRET: Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope.
FAME: Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer.
FLAMES: Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph.
FLIRT: Fast local infrared thermogenetics.
FORTE: Fast On-orbit Rapid Recording of Transient Events.
FPI: The Future Photon Initiative, an optics center at my university. All emails from the director go out to the 'FPI agents'.
FROG: Frequency Resolved Optical Grating.
GANDALF: Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting, software for spectroscopy. Refers to the Tolkien character from Lord of The Rings, etc.
GLIMPSE: Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire.
HAYSTAC: Haloscope At Yale Sensitive to Axion Cold dark matter.
MAGIC: Media, Arts, Games, Interaction and Creativity center at my university.
MUSTANG: Multiplexed SQUID TES Array at Ninety GHz.
OWL: OverWhelmingly Large Telescope. This has only been proposed, and does not exist.
PATRIOT: Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target, it's the radar component of the famous missile.
QROCODILE: Quantum Resolution-Optimized Cryogenic Observatory for Dark matter Incident at Low Energy.
RABBITT: Reconstruction of Attosecond Beating by Interference of Two-photon Transitions.
SPIDER: Spectral Phase Interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction.
SQUID: Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, a machine for detecting magnetic fields.
STORM: STochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy.
TRIUMF: TRI-University Meson Facility. Canadian national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, including the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Victoria.
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