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

[Ron Baalke]

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.

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