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BackgrounderAstrophysics Team Wins International Award for Radio Telescope TechnologyInternational Astronautics Laurels for NRC ScientistThe 2005 Laurels for Team Achievement Award of the International Academy of Astronautics has been given to the VLBI Space Observatory Programme (VSOP) team. Dr. Peter Dewdney of the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics (NRC-HIA) is the team’s Principal Canadian Investigator. Fifteen scientists from Japan, the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia shared this award. Past recipients of the prestigious team award were famous in their own right: the Hubble Space Telescope Team (2004), the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory team (2003), the US Shuttle team (2002), and the Russian Mir Space Station team (2001). The award coincides with the 56th annual congress of the International Academy of Astronautics, being held in Fukuoka, Japan. The NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, located in British Columbia, has world-renowned expertise in telescope technologies and software. The Canadian Space Agency invested $3.2 million in VSOP. Canada provides the VSOP with one of its three radio-wavelength correlators. These instruments collect data from earth-bound tracking stations and ground radio telescopes, and then process it to produce detailed radio images of stars and galaxies. This technique, known as very long baseline interferometry, was pioneered by NRC. The Canadian VSOP team was funded by the Canadian Space Agency and, besides Dr. Dewdney, included Dr. Russ Taylor of the University of Calgary and Dr. Wayne Cannon of York University. The citation notes that the VSOP team realized the long-held dream to extend baselines (distances) into space, by observing celestial sources with a Japanese satellite, supported by a dedicated network of tracking stations, and by arrays of ground radio telescopes around the world. Together, this very long baseline interferometry technique has enabled astronomers to produce images with the highest angular resolution, close to 100 times better than with the Hubble Space optical Telescope. HALCA, the Japanese satellite with a 8m-diameter telescope, was launched with a M-V rocket from Japan’s Kagoshima Space Center on 12 February 1997, into an orbit reaching an apogee near 21 400 km above Earth. Combining the satellite with each ground-station, satellite-to-ground baseline separations can be achieved as long as 3 times the Earth’s radius (itself near 6 400 km). HALCA symbolically means Highly Advanced Laboratory for Communications and Astronomy; its Japanese name is Haruka, meaning ‘far-away’. The Canadian high-tech correlator precisely matches the data downloaded from the HALCA satellite with the data from other telescopes on Earth. HALCA’s scientific achievements include the monitoring of relativistic jets being ejected from the environment around supermassive black holes in active galaxies, on milli-arcsec scales. For comparison, the Moon subtends 1800 arcseconds (half a degree). ContactsPeter Dewdney Jacques P. Vallée Related Web SitesCanadian Space Agency
NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics
The following hyperlinks are to sites of organizations or other entities that are not subject to the Official Languages Act. The material found there is therefore in the language(s) used by the sites in question. International Academy of Astronautics
Institute of Space and Astronautical Science
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