Astronomy without borders

Remote controlled telescopes come to three countries.

Australian astronomers have remotely controlled three telescopes in Australia, China and Japan in a demonstration at Shanghai Observatory this week.

A 25-m radio telescope of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, the 34-m telescope of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Kashima, Japan, and the CSIRO radio telescopes near Parkes, in New South Wales, Australia, required 512 megabytes per second of bandwidth to stream huge packets of data across the world at gigabytes a second.

“We’re now in the age of astronomy without borders,” said Dr Tasso Tzioumis of CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF).

“From a single operations centre we can make huge streams of precisely time-linked data flow simultaneously between several countries, at gigabits per second.”

The demonstration at Shanghai Observatory was part of the 7th Annual International Meeting on ‘e-VLBI’ (electronic very long baseline interferometry). E-VLBI is the technique of simultaneously using telescopes hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart to form a single coordinated system.

The target objects for the demonstration were mainly black holes in distant galaxies.

“The demonstration establishes two things,” said Dr Chris Phillips, CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility: “First, we’ve shown Australia can be the data-processing centre for these international experiments. Previously, we’d had the data going out of Australia rather than into it.
 
“Second, we’ve proved that the Australian, Chinese and Japanese systems, which grew up independently, are compatible. That’s important for doing future experiments together in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Working with telescopes

Read about our Role Model who manages a telescope – a  Large Millimeter Telescope – in his everyday activities.

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