The first ASKAP dish

[talmor]

This is the first dish in ASKAP, the other Square Kilometre Array prototype telescope being built out at Boolardy, by CSIRO. They had just poured the foundations for this dish when I was out there in December - now it's up and ready to go. It'll be joined by 35 identical dishes over the next year or two, to make ASKAP. If the full SKA goes ahead

Comments

[ariaflame]

Somehow I'd gotten the impression that the plan for the SKA radio dishes was for them to be... smaller. And less dishy.

[shrydar]

Shiny!

How steerable is it?

[talmor]

The current SKA plans are a whole lot of steerable dishes much like this, around 10m diameter (I think this one is 9.5m), to handle high frequencies, plus the same collecting area in low-frequency flat tiles with no moving parts.

The dishes are steerable in three axes - altitude, azimuth, and dish rotation - instead of having a single 'pixel' receiver, it's a 'focal plane array' of tiny feed-horn-like elements. The structure that supports the receiver array generates a lot of diffraction effects that would spoil the images if the dish didn't rotate to keep the same orientation on the sky as it tracks the object.

Of course, handling cable wrap issues while rotating in three dimensions is tricky...

[redbraids]

That is very cool! It will be amazing once it is all finished!