350km radio telescope

ToSeek · #1 (**permalink**) 15-September-2004, 04:06 PM

Well, sort of:

LOFAR: A Giant Radio Telescope Takes Shape

Quote:

When completed in a few years, the Low Frequency Array, or LOFAR, will consist of some 15,000 small radio antennas linked by fiber optics to a new-generation supercomputer. The computer will process huge amounts of raw signals to observe distant galaxies and pre-galaxies, gas in the Milky Way, solar flares, cosmic rays, gamma-ray bursts, and much else.

ToSeek · #2 (**permalink**) 15-September-2004, 08:53 PM

And while we're talking about radio telescopes:

Radio Astronomy Will Get a Boost With the Square Kilometer Array

Quote:

It will probe the dark ages before the era of re-ionization, and perhaps before the birth of the first stars. It will observe the formation of the first galaxies. It will map the web of neutral Hydrogen that is spread across our universe, near and far. In 2015, an array of 4400 twelve meter fully steerable paraboloid radio dishes, called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is scheduled to be complete and operational.

polytropos · #3 (**permalink**) 16-September-2004, 03:57 AM

Couldn't find a resolution for the LOFAR, but the SKA article gives 500 microarcseconds as a target resolution. The VLBA website gives one milliarcsecond as their best resolution. But I guess that's not the only goal.

ToSeek · #4 (**permalink**) 29-April-2005, 04:33 PM

Huge radio telescope boasts supercomputer brain

Quote:

One of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is to be the brain of a revolutionary new radio telescope called LOFAR. The telescope will look back to the time of the very first stars, map our galaxy's magnetic field and perhaps discover the mysterious sources of high-energy cosmic rays.

Instead of one large rigid dish, LOFAR will use thousands of simple radio antennae. Their signals will be woven together at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands by STELLA, the new supercomputer, which was launched on Tuesday and is unofficially ranked as the third most powerful on the planet.

LOFAR needs its own supercomputer because it aims to detect radio wavelengths of up to 30 metres. Such long-wave radio images are blurry, and the only way to make them sharper is to build a vast array of detectors spread over hundreds of kilometres.

Manchurian Taikonaut · #5 (**permalink**) 03-May-2005, 06:30 PM

I think some scientists were looking at a place in China
http://www.bao.ac.cn/bao/station/my/...st/issc/issc4/
but I'm not sure the Chinese site is good enough for the scale size

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