CSIRO’s newest telescope, the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), standing tall in Western Australia. Credit: Alex Cherney/terrastro.com
CSIRO is pretty proud of its new 36 dish ASKAP radio telescope currently being developed in the outback of Western Australia.
Now in its commissioning phase, ASKAP has been designed to be able to survey the whole sky extremely quickly.
It will do this with a new type of technology – a phased array feed or ‘radio camera’. This gives the telescope a very wide field of view: 30 square degrees, or 150 times the area the full Moon takes up in the sky, visible in a single snapshot.
The telescope has ambitious aims – hoping to help find answers to questions involving dark matter, dark energy, the nature of gravity, the origins of the first stars and galaxies, and more.
You can see a wonderful time-lapse of the ASKAP telescope in motion here, under a magnificent Milky Way sky.
