The Parkes dish is 60, but it’s still making major scientific breakthroughs
Happy birthday!
Decades of discovery
John Bolton was appointed the founding director of the telescope. Under his dynamic, decade-long tenure, astronomers made a string of significant discoveries that established the dish as the premier scientific instrument in Australia.
Astronomers revealed the immense magnetic field of our Milky Way galaxy. A few months later, the telescope detected quasars, the most distant known objects in the Universe – a discovery that increased the size of the known Universe tenfold. To cap off a memorable first year, Parkes tracked the very first interplanetary space mission, Mariner 2, when it flew past Venus in December 1962.
In the 1970s, researchers discovered and mapped the immense molecular clouds interspersed through our galaxy. The study of pulsars – rotating stars that emit beams of radio waves, rather like a lighthouse – became a major field of research. Parkes has discovered more pulsars than all other radio observatories combined, including the only known double pulsar system, spotted in 2003.
In the 1990s, the distribution of galaxies was mapped to a distance of 300 million light-years, revealing the complex structure of the Universe. More recently, Parkes discovered the first Fast Radio Burst – a short, intenseblast of radio wavescreated by an as-yet-unknown process. The telescope has also been involved in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), including the ten-yearBreakthrough Listen project, which began in 2016.
To the public, the telescope is perhaps best known for its space tracking, especially its role in the Apollo lunar missions. But it has also supported other significant missions such as NASA’sVoyager 2, which flew past Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s and crossed into interstellar space in 2018. In 1986, Parkes was the prime tracking station for the European Giotto mission to Halley’s Comet. And next year, Parkes will track some of the first commercial lunar landers.
Originally intended to operate for 20 years, the telescope’s longevity is a result of constant upgrades. Recent improvements include a new ultra-wideband receiver that can scan a huge range of radio frequencies, and CSIRO-developed “phased array feeds” (PAFs) that allow the telescope to observe up to 36 points in the sky at once. Work is now underway on a cryogenically cooled PAF that, when installed in 2022, will double this number. With these upgrades in place, a single receiver can be used to deliver more than 90% of current Parkes operations.
It’s hard to say how long the Parkes dish will continue to work. It depends on future upgrades and whether the telescope’s structure remains in good working order. But astronomers will always have a need for a large single-dish antenna.
Parkes has maintained its world-leading position in radio astronomy by constantly adapting to meet new requirements. Today it stands as an icon of Australian science and achievement. Sixty years after it first trained its eye on the sky, the future still looks bright at Parkes.
Article byJohn Sarkissian, Operations Scientist,CSIRO
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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