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."
Too bad this is a radio telescope and not optical. No comparison to Hubble.
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