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© Rob Millenaar
The IAR is the home for the radio astronomy activities in Argentina. I recently passed through their offices on my way to Chile, and met with Marcelo Arnal, its director, and some of the engineers. I updated them on the current state of the SKA project, its schedule and future. We also discussed the developments in spectrum monitoring. In return I was updated on the projects that IAR is involved in. Examples are:
The photo shows a collage of impressions of the IAR facility in Villa Eliza, near La Plata. The upper left panel shows the twin 30 meter radio telescopes that are now retired, until funds are found to revive and rescue them, just as was done for the Dwingeloo telescope. The upper right and lower left panels show the control panels that once set the telescopes in motion. The top middle panel shows an interesting remnant of the past: the META II supercomputer, which was dedicated to SETI searches. This was a quite famous specialised beast, developed by Harvard in the late eighties. In the early nineties one of the 30 meter telescopes was used to do a southern hemisphere survey at 21 cm with a spectral resolution of 0.05Hz. The mid-bottom panel shows IAR's anechoic chamber, which is used for antenna measurements. It is quite large: about 12x6x6 meters.
No visit to the La Plata region would be complete without a visit to the old Gautier optical telescope in the downtown observatory, see the panel lower right. A 43.3 cm telescope, with a whopping 9.7 meter focal length, the telescope was built in 1894, and is still in good working condition.
