Daily Image
28-06-2019
Building a LOFAR station, one stick at a time
| Submitter: | Tammo Jan Dijkema |
| Description: | In Irbene, near the city of Ventspils in Latvia, currently the 54th LOFAR station is being built. This station will add a ~1980km baseline to the LOFAR array, enhancing the UV coverage on the longest baselines and thus giving the possibility to measure even tinier details in the low frequency radio sky. Building a LOFAR array requires careful positioning of each antenna, much in the same way that optical telescope mirrors and higher frequency radio dishes need to be very flat. To position the antennas on the field, we use the help of a professional land surveyor, in this case Facto-Geo (formerly Azimuth Geodetic) - the same surveyor that also surveyed the LOFAR core. Armed with a 'total station' (a digital theodolite combined with a distance meter), each stick was positioned with millimeter precision, which was not particularly easy, because of the rocky surface. In the first week of June, the land surveying for the Latvian station took place. Coincidentally, this was exactly 10 years after building the first LOFAR station, see the corresponding daily image. We placed over 700 survey stakes in the prepared field, next to the 32m Irbene dish. The new LOFAR station is built under supervison of Ventspils University of Applied sciences (VUAS). The new LOFAR station will expand its capabilities w.r.t. research in astronomy as well as electrical engineering and data sciences. It was very nice to see the outline of this Latvian LOFAR station appear on an empty field. It is now clear that within months this will be another great addition to the International LOFAR telescope. |
| Copyright: | CC-BY-4.0 Tammo Jan Dijkema |
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