The ATNF in Brief

Observatories

The Australia Telescope, operated by CSIRO's Division of Astronomy and Space Science, consists of eight radio-receiving antennas, located at three sites in New South Wales.

Six of them make up the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), located at the Paul Wild Observatory near the town of Narrabri. Five of these antennas sit on a 3-km stretch of rail track running east-west; they can be moved to different points along the track to build up detailed images of the sky. A sixth antenna lies 3 kilometres to the west of the main group. Each of these antennas has a reflecting surface 22 m in diameter. After the radio signals from space are "collected" by the antennas' surfaces they are transformed into electrical signals, brought together at a central location, and then processed. The end result is usually a picture of the object being studied-a picture equivalent to a photograph, but made from radio waves instead of light.

A further 22-m antenna, known as the CSIRO Mopra telescope, is located near Mopra rock, in the Warrambungle mountains near Coonabarabran, New South Wales.

The other key component of the Australia Telescope is the CSIRO Parkes 64-m radio telescope, located near the town of Parkes. This telescope has been successfully operated since 1961 and is famous as a national symbol for Australian scientific achievement. Recent upgrades to accommodate a 13-beam focal-plane array have maintained its world-class position as a state-of-the-art instrument.

The eight ATNF telescopes can be used together as a Long Baseline Array (LBA) for a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) which is used to obtain high resolution images of small areas of sky. The Long Baseline Array is used as part of an Australian network of radio telescopes which includes the NASA satellite tracking antennas at Tidbinbilla, near Canberra and radio antennas in Tasmania, South Australia and West Australia. The LBA is also regularly used as part of the Asia-Pacific Telescope which links radio telescopes in Australia, Japan, China, Hawaii and India, and the VLBI space observatory program (VSOP).