Daily Image
08-04-2014
Almost invisible heroes
| Submitter: | Wim van Cappellen for the APERTIF team |
| Description: | Invisible to the crowd in Dwingeloo, a team of hard workers is upgrading two WSRT dishes (in the winter season!!) for the APERTIF ALPHA-3 system. The upgrade of a WSRT dish to APERTIF requires a significant amount of mechanical modifications: The MFFE system has to be removed, including coaxial cables, helium pipes and the heavy frame at the front of the feed cabin to which the MFFE was bolted. The entire chassis of the telescope is blasted and painted. A total of 129 coaxial RF cables is installed to bring the output signals of the PAF to the cabin on the ground. New cable trays and chains are mounted to smoothly support the cables. The rails in the feed cabin is lowered, new mounting points are created and the radome is replaced. Finally, the cabin on the ground is powered via a new distribution panel in the brick telescope house. The work on RT4 was recently completed. The photos above show the end result of the operation and the heroes that performed the work. Thanks to their effort, RT4 can be equipped with a PAF in the very near future and used for APERTIF commissioning measurements. |
| Copyright: | ASTRON, 2014. |
| Tweet |  |