Starship Asterisk*

They dangled above the giant dish featured in GoldenEye and Contact

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

A team of BYU engineers built a super-sensitive antenna for processing signals from deep space. Then they flew to Puerto Rico and installed it at about the same spot where Pierce Brosnan and Sean Bean battled it out during the climax of the James Bond film GoldenEye.

That spot is a platform suspended on cables 500 feet above the world’s largest radio telescope, located at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which is 1,000 feet in diameter. Despite its size, the observatory is limited in how quickly it can scan deep space.

“The higher power the telescope is, the smaller the point in the sky you can look at with a single pointing – it’s like a pinhole,” explained Brian Jeffs, professor of electrical and computer engineering. “We’re giving them the ability to look at a larger portion of the sky.”

Astronomers from around the world, who study such phenomena as pulsars, gases around galaxies, and dark matter, have to compete for observation time at the few available world-class radio telescopes.

Most single dish radio telescopes can only capture one "image pixel" at a time – the Arecibo telescope recently boosted that to seven. But the BYU team’s device – which is actually an array of many small antennas – aims to raise the field of view to an unprecedented 40 pixels without losing any sensitivity.

neufer wrote:How do they expect Pierce Brosnan and Sean Bean to battle it out in that inverted goldfish bowl