CSIRO Part of Networks Which Created First "World Telescope" in Real-time. (September 7, 2007)

    Last week a CSIRO's radio telescope near Coonabarabran, NSW was used simultaneously with one near Shanghai, China, and five in Europe to observe the distant galaxy called 3C273.

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) operations and development manager at CSIRO’s Australia National Telescope Facility, Dr Tasso Tzioumis, said this was the first time that scientists had been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart, and demonstrate the power of high-speed global networks.

Dr Tzioumis said data from the telescopes was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second - about ten times faster than the fastest broadband speeds (ADSL2+) available to Australian households - to a research centre in Europe, where it was processed with a special-purpose digital processor.

The results were then transmitted to Xi’an, China, where experts in advanced networking watched it live at the 24^th APAN (Asia-Pacific Advanced Network) Meeting.

Dr Tzioumis said from Australia to Europe, the CSIRO data travelled on a dedicated 1 Gb per second link set up by the Australian, Canadian and Dutch national research and education networks, AARNet, CANARIE and SURFnet respectively.

“The more widely separated the telescopes, the more finely detailed the observations can be. The diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart, in a straight line,” said Dr Tzioumis.

The experiment used the 1 Gb per second networks that now connect CSIRO’s NSW observatories to Sydney and beyond.

Previously VLBI used to take weeks or months: “We used to record data on tapes or disks at each telescope, along with time signals from atomic clocks. The tapes or disks would then be shipped to a central processing facility to be combined,” Dr Tzioumis said

 Click here to access a Podcast of Dr Tzioumis describing the event