Astronomers Want to Build the Next Generation Arecibo Telescope - by BrianKoberlein
The proposed design has 102 localized dishes. Credit: Roshi, et al
One of the first things this design does is get rid of the single dish. While there are modern single-dish telescopes, such as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope , they are much larger than Arecibo’s original 300-meter design. It isn’t feasible to build an even larger single dish at the Arecibo location. So the team proposes an array of 102 13-meter dishes. In comparison, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array has 54 12-meter dishes and a dozen 7-meter dishes.
By placing the dishes in such a configuration, the new design could function as a single dish. Most array telescopes gather data as individual dishes, then integrate the data through a process called correlation. This allows for an array to act as a single virtual dish but does so at some cost of sensitivity. Another way to combine data is called a phased array, which integrates the data as if the dishes were all at the same point.
It’s an interesting design, but at this stage, there are several interesting designs being proposed. The process from initial idea to approved design to construction is long and arduous, to say nothing of the challenge of funding. It could be decades before a new telescope is built at Arecibo Observatory. But designs such as this show how astronomers leverage both the old and the new and find amazing ways to explore the universe more than ever before.
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