350 KM Diameter Radio Telescope Array

photonic writes "Yesterday the Dutch government awarded a 52 Million Euro grant (press release in Dutch) to the Lofar, or Low Frequency Array telescope. Instead of traditional single large disk, the telescope will consist of 25000 small base stations, which are each not much more than small omni-directional antennas. Together they will be used as a phased array with enormous resolution. The base stations will be spread out across the northern part of the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Eventually, the telescope will be part of an international collaboration, with additional arrays planned by MIT and in Australia. There are also plans to add more sensors to the base stations to form a distributed network for monitoring weather, earthquakes and the like. The array should be finished in 2006 and will cost around 150 MEuro total. The telescope will also be very interesting from an IT point of view: Dedicated fiber optical cables will be needed for the enormous amount of data transport (Tera-bits/second). This was actually used as a big selling point, because some rural areas will get fast internet access as an aside. There are contacts with IBM to use one of their future Blue Gene supercomputers for the central data processing. An English brochure is available with more details."

Comments

Re:How far does it scale up?

[photonic]

Note that resolution gets better with a bigger array size, but gets worse with bigger wavelength (or lower frequency).

Assuming a frequency of 100MHz, the resolution of LoFAr would be equivalent with a (350km * 100e6Hz / 5e14Hz =) 7 cm optical telescope or a 70 cm telescope when operating at 1 GHz. Although not much compared to Hubble or Keck, this would probably give some nice images.