Massive Radio Telescope Starts Observing the Skies 44
New submitter cyachallenge writes with this excerpt from New Scientist: "RadioAstron, effectively the largest radio telescope ever built, is up and running. The telescope's main component, a 10-metre radio dish aboard the spacecraft Spectr-R, launched in July to an oblong orbit that extends between 10,000 and more than 300,000 kilometres from Earth. By coordinating observations with radio telescopes on Earth in a technique called interferometry, the telescope can make observations as sharp as a single dish spanning the entire distance between the two farthest dishes. When Spectr-R is at its farthest from Earth, the system acts like one enormous telescope about 30 times as wide as our planet, boasting about 10,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope."
Re:oblong?? (Score:4, Insightful)
I always thought Oblong was more rectangular than elliptical. Of course the rectangle with rounded corners was invented by apple.
Hats off to Russian scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike the Chinese, that seem to do a lot of "me, too" stuff (which is very impressive, of course), the Russians do work that is nicely complementing the US, European (ESA) and Japanese efforts. The Spektr-R (and RadioAstron) is something novel and unique, and will provide insights in the astrophysics and astronomy beyond the Milky Way with high angular resolution.
Another example is ill-fated Phobos Grunt. It would have been another interesting and unique experiment.
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why such a pitifully small dish? (Score:2, Insightful)
But what is the curvature error of the TerreStar-1 dish? And of the RadioAstron? You have to compare _that_, not just dish diameter, to understand why they did not/could not make it bigger... Besides, a larger dish means more orbital interference from solar wind, etc.