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Massive Radio Telescope Starts Observing the Skies
New submitter cyachallenge writes with this excerpt from New Scientist: "RadioAstron, effectively the largest radio telescope ever built, is up and running. The telescope's main component, a 10-metre radio dish aboard the spacecraft Spectr-R, launched in July to an oblong orbit that extends between 10,000 and more than 300,000 kilometres from Earth. By coordinating observations with radio telescopes on Earth in a technique called interferometry, the telescope can make observations as sharp as a single dish spanning the entire distance between the two farthest dishes. When Spectr-R is at its farthest from Earth, the system acts like one enormous telescope about 30 times as wide as our planet, boasting about 10,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope."
I always thought Oblong was more rectangular than elliptical. Of course the rectangle with rounded corners was invented by apple.
Unlike the Chinese, that seem to do a lot of "me, too" stuff (which is very impressive, of course), the Russians do work that is nicely complementing the US, European (ESA) and Japanese efforts. The Spektr-R (and RadioAstron) is something novel and unique, and will provide insights in the astrophysics and astronomy beyond the Milky Way with high angular resolution.
Another example is ill-fated Phobos Grunt. It would have been another interesting and unique experiment.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
That's one hell of a shift.
But what is the curvature error of the TerreStar-1 dish? And of the RadioAstron? You have to compare _that_, not just dish diameter, to understand why they did not/could not make it bigger... Besides, a larger dish means more orbital interference from solar wind, etc.