Status of the Sardinia Radio Telescope project

We present the status of the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) project, a new general purpose, fully steerable 64 m diameter parabolic radiotelescope capable to operate with high efficiency in the 0.3-116 GHz frequency range. The instrument is the result of a scientific and technical collaboration among three Structures of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF): the Institute of Radio Astronomy of Bologna, the Cagliari Astronomy Observatory (in Sardinia,) and the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in Florence. Funding agencies are the Italian Ministry of Education and Scientific Research, the Sardinia Regional Government, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI,) that has recently rejoined the project. The telescope site is about 35 km North of Cagliari. The radio telescope has a shaped Gregorian optical configuration with a 7.9 m diameter secondary mirror and supplementary Beam-WaveGuide (BWG) mirrors. With four possible focal positions (primary, Gregorian, and two BWGs), SRT will be able to allocate up to 20 remotely controllable receivers. One of the most advanced technical features of the SRT is the active surface: the primary mirror will be composed by 1008 panels supported by electromechanical actuators digitally controlled to compensate for gravitational deformations. With the completion of the foundation on spring 2006 the SRT project entered its final construction phase. This paper reports on the latest advances on the SRT project.

Coverage

Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes II

Series

0277786X

Volume

7012

Start page

70120F

Conferenece

Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes II

Conferenece place

Marseille, France

Conferenece date

23-28 June, 2008

File(s)

Name

Tofani_et_al_2008_70120F.pdf

Size

1.59 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (MD5)

085a098a9eef6ae6a0e776eb712fd5e7

Status of the Sardinia Radio Telescope project

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