A Telescope The Size Of The Earth

Neil Blender writes "From this article: "Astronomers have fashioned an Earth-sized virtual radio telescope that can distinguish celestial features 3,000 times smaller than the those observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The device, which uses atomic clocks and a custom supercomputer to link together radio dishes on three continents, is the most powerful radio observatory ever, according to scientists." Some parts of the custom supercomputer use linux and IDE RAID."

Comments

Re:SETI already does something like this

[dcowart]

Actually, I'm wondering why they need to coordinate the analysis in realtime. What's the factor that makes realtime analysis and the bandwidth needed for that necessary?
Pulling the data together after the fact and then analyzing it shouldn't result in a different conclusion of facts based on the data.