“Such a new system would open a window into the Universe, allowing us to see our neighboring planets and celestial objects in a whole new way.”
“After those designs, if we can attract full funding support, we will be able to build a system hundreds of times more powerful than the current one and use it to explore the Solar System,” said Beasley.
These promising early results have garnered support for the project from the scientific community and in late September the collaboration received $4.5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation for designing ways the project could be extended (Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1 design award AST-2131866).
Ten or so years ago it would have taken months of computing to get one of the images from one receiver, and maybe a year or more from more than one.” “This has been done before at distances of a few hundred km, but not on the hundreds of thousands of kilometers scales of this project, and not with the high resolutions of a meter or so at these distances. “Radar data like this has never been recorded before at this distance or resolution,” said Watts. These differences are examined and used to compute an image resolution higher than what is possible with stationary observations, as well as to increase the resolution of the distance to the target, how fast the target is moving toward or away from the receiver, and how the target is moving across the field of view. This movement causes slight differences from radar pulse to pulse. While you might think this could make producing an image more difficult, it actually yields more important data.” The transmitter, the target, and the receivers are all constantly moving as we move through space. The stored pulses are compared to each other and analyzed to produce an image.
“As each pulse is transmitted by the GBT, it’s reflected off the target, the surface of the moon in this case, and it’s received and stored. How is this low-powered radar signal translated into images we can see? “It’s done with a process called Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR,” explained Galen Watts, a GBO engineer. Using the GBT and antennas from the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), several tests have been conducted since that time, focusing on the surface of the Moon, including the Tycho Crater and NASA Apollo landing sites. The GBT- the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope-was outfitted in late 2020 with new technology developed by Raytheon Intelligence & Space and GBO, allowing it to transmit a radar signal into space. “While more work lies ahead to improve these images, we’re excited to share this incredible image with the public, and look forward to sharing more images from this project in the near future.” Tony Beasley, Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and vice president for Radio Astronomy at Associated Universities, Inc. “This is the largest synthetic aperture radar image we have produced to date with the help of our partners at Raytheon,” said Dr. The image covers an area of 200km by 175km, ensuring that involved scientists and engineers captured the entire crater, which measures 86km in diameter. The resolution of the new Tycho Crater image is close to five meters by five meters and contains approximately 1.4 billion pixels. The National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory (GBO) and National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RI&S) have released a new high-resolution image of the Moon, the highest-ever taken from the ground using new radar technology on the Green Bank Telescope (GBT).