Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy - 26 May 2010
NWO grant for an innovative radio camera
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), in the context of its Large Grants programme, has awarded a grant of nearly 2.5 million Euro to astronomers of ASTRON Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy and the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the University of Groningen. This funding enables the implementation of an important improvement of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), allowing this facility to remain one of the world's most advanced radio telescopes.
The APERTIF project concerns the replacement of the current radio antennas, a single antenna in each of the fourteen dishes of the WSRT, by an array of more than a hundred coupled antennas near the focal point of each dish. This revolutionary ‘radio camera' widens the existing field-of-view of the Westerbork telescope, currently similar to the size of the full moon, by more than a factor thirty. Such an expansion of its field-of-view allows astronomers to study galaxies, pulsars and magnetic fields in the universe, in a new and unprecedented manner. The required technological developments for this advanced antenna system has been funded by previous grants from NWO and the European Union. The present grant from NWO is instrumental for the successful scientific commissioning and exploitation of this technology for the WSRT.