[meteorite-list] Arecibo Joins Global Network to Create 6, 000-mile Telescope

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 19:42:38 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <200806070242.TAA09080_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

Chronicle Online e-News

Arecibo joins global network to create 6,000-mile telescope
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June08/arecibo.vlbi.html

June 6, 2008

By Lauren Gold
lg34 at cornell.edu

On May 22, Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico joined other telescopes
in North America, South America, Europe and Africa in simultaneously
observing the same targets, simulating a telescope more than 6,800
miles (almost 11,000 kilometers) in diameter.

The telescopes are all members of the Express Production Real-time
e-VLBI Service (EXPReS) project, and May 22 marked a live
demonstration of their first four-continent, real-time, electronic
Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI) observations.

VLBI uses multiple radio telescopes to simultaneously observe the
same region of sky -- essentially creating a giant instrument as big
as the separation of the dishes. VLBI can generate images of cosmic
radio sources with up to 100 times better resolution than images from
the best optical telescopes.

The results were immediately transmitted to Belgium, where they were
shown as part of the 2008 Trans-European Research and Education
Networking Association Conference.

The Arecibo team called the demonstration a major milestone in the
telescope's e-VLBI participation, with a data-streaming rate to the
central signal processor at the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe
(JIVE) in the Netherlands four times higher than Arecibo had
previously achieved.

"These results are very significant for the advance of radio
astronomy," said JIVE director Huib Jan van Langevelde. "It shows not
only that telescopes of the future can be developed in worldwide
collaboration, but that they can also be operated as truly global
instruments."

EXPReS, funded by the European Commission, aims to connect up to 16
of the world's most sensitive radio telescopes to the JIVE processor
to correlate VLBI data in real time. This replaces the traditional
VLBI method of shipping data on disk and provides astronomers with
observational data in a matter of hours rather than weeks, allowing
them to respond rapidly to transient events with follow-up
observations.

Cornell's National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center manages Arecibo
Observatory for the National Science Foundation.

-- 

Received on Fri 06 Jun 2008 10:42:38 PM PDT