Sunday, September 21, 2008

Puerto Rico's Arecibo Telescope: The Centerpiece for Space Exploration



By now you have probably heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which some still believe will kill us all. But there is another project underway called the E-VLBI which stands for "electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometery" or the "we are turning the earth into a radio dish" project.

Essentially the E-VLBI project has every radio observatory on this side of the Earth look at the exact spot in the night sky at the same time. The data then is collected in a series of supercomputers for analysis. The effect is to turn the face of the earth into one single large radio telescope. The result of which will be images 100 times better than ever received either through a radio or optical telescopes.

The project, already underway since May 22, makes the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the centerpiece of a united/multinational mission to explore the universe.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, some politicians have slighted the Observatory with their actions, even when they say they're protecting it...

http://www.elsorbeto.com/?p=49