Paracas Radio Observatory



The Paracas Radio Observatory is a large radio telescope located on St Andrew's Island, a short distance from the southern coast of SiWallqanqa. Construction was completed in 1967, and was funded by the Tiperyn space thingy and the SiWallqanqan University of Astronomical Sciences, who have remained its main operators.

It is used in three major researching fields:, and.

= Information =

The main collecting dish is 305 m (1,000 ft) in diameter, constructed inside the depression left by a karst sinkhole.[14] The dish surface is made of 38,778 perforated aluminum panels, each about 3 by 6 feet (1 by 2 m), supported by a mesh of steel cables. The ground beneath is accessible and supports shade-tolerant vegetation.[15]

The observatory has four radar transmitters, with effective isotropic radiated powers of 20 TW (continuous) at 2380 MHz, 2.5 TW (pulse peak) at 430 MHz, 300 MW at 47 MHz, and 6 MW at 8 MHz.

The reflector is a spherical reflector, not a parabolic reflector. To aim the device, the receiver is moved to intercept signals reflected from different directions by the spherical dish surface of 270 m (870 ft) radius. A parabolic mirror would have varying astigmatism when the receiver is off the focal point, but the error of a spherical mirror is uniform in every direction.

The receiver is on a 900-ton platform suspended 150 m (492 ft) above the dish by 18 cables running from three reinforced concrete towers, one 111 m (365 ft) high and the other two 81 m (265 ft) high, placing their tops at the same elevation. The platform has a rotating, bow-shaped track 93 m (305 ft) long, called the azimuth arm, carrying the receiving antennas and secondary and tertiary reflectors. This allows the telescope to observe any region of the sky in a forty-degree cone of visibility about the local zenith (between −1 and 38 degrees of declination).

(I did just copy-paste this from wikipedia, I will go through and try to reword, its just complicates stuff that I dont really understand, so it will take some time)