Halfway mark for NOEMA, the super-telescope under construction:
The completion of NOEMA phase 1, the first phase of the NOEMA project was officially celebrated on Wednesday, September 19th. The Max Planck Society and its partner institute IRAM have completed the first, decisive step towards one of the most important German-French-Spanish initiatives in astronomy: upgrading the NOEMA observatory in the French Alps and developing the most powerful and most sensitive telescope at millimetre wavelengths in the Northern hemisphere. Four years after the inauguration of the first NOEMA antenna, ten 15-meter dishes currently constitute the observatory and have provided ground-breaking scientific results.
NOEMA (NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array) is part of a completely new generation of radio telescopes: it consists of an array of several movable telescopes placed on tracks, equipped with state-of-the-art reception systems which combine to form the equivalent of a single, giant telescope.
With outstanding sensitivity and resolution, NOEMA permits to explore the cold universe at temperatures very near absolute zero at -273.15 degrees Celsius, unveiling objects impossible to observe using optical instruments because they are hidden by interstellar clouds of cosmic dust.
[...] In the future, a total of 12 antennas will scan the sky in the service of the researchers, currently ten antennas have already been constructed on the Plateau de Bure in the French Alps.
[...] During observations, the ten antennas interact to build one single telescope, a technique called interferometry. The resolving power of such a network of telescopes equals that of one single telescope with a diameter of the maximum distance between the antennas. For NOEMA, this is equivalent to a telescope of up to 760 meters diameter and a resolving power of less than one arc second. In other words, the NOEMA antennas could detect a smartphone from a distance of more than 500 kilometres.
[...] The second project phase will last until 2021 and foresees, besides antennas 11 and 12, the extension of the track system which will allow to place the antennas at a distance of 1.7 kilometres, increasing tenfold the sensitivity of measurements compared to what has been possible until now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23 2018, @10:04PM (1 child)
James Webb is halfway done too now! But you can say that for any value of now.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday September 24 2018, @07:34PM
Unlike the Webb, they actually have ten working antennas producing data, and zero chance of a total loss at liftoff.
Now, let's discuss how they manage to make building 10 antennas the halfway point of building twelve...
According to Google maps, the area where they're placing those is definitely not 1.7km wide, so I'm looking forward to them building a new mountain to keep all these things coplanar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23 2018, @10:21PM (1 child)
"NOEMA antennas could detect a smartphone from a distance of more than 500 kilometres"
I think the Deep Space Network is doing a lot better than that already.
Is this 500 kilometers assuming the curvature of the earth between them and the source?
If so, how do they point their arrays that far towards the ground?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @03:22AM
The smart phone is on the ISS dummy. They hold it out the window.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23 2018, @10:49PM
Somebody point the telescope at some child porn right quick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @03:58AM
What do the psychics say?
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Monday September 24 2018, @11:22AM
New technology? VLBI [wikipedia.org] has been around since I was a kid in the 70's.