Internet2 > IDEA Awards > 2008 Awards

IDEA Award Winner 2008: Wave of the Future

Transforming High-Angular Resolution Astrophysics

• Shaun Amy, Data Transmission Specialist, CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility
• Chris Phillips, eVLBI Project Scientist, CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility
• Tasso Tzioumis, Project Leader, Australian Long Baseline Array, CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility
• Adam Deller Ph.D. Student, Swinburne University of Technology

By connecting telescopes spread across thousands of kilometers, electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI) provides very high-resolution images of cosmic radio sources. Recent developments in optical networking allow real-time data transfers data from each telescope, drastically increasing the ability to respond to short lived cosmic events. By eliminating the need to ship disks for processing to a central location, network-based e-VLBI provides astronomers with near real time results, allowing them to exploit transient astronomical events—even while experiments are in progress. The technology enables them to make adjustments or changes in strategy to maximize the science output, or to identify and fix problems at telescopes.

The CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) works closely with other institutions in Europe, Asia, and the United States, such as the MIT Haystack Observatory. The team will receive a dedicated, 10 Gigabit per second optical circuit from Internet2 WaveCo, sponsored by Level 3 Communications, to enable ATNF to connect its three observatories to other radio telescope observatories in the United States and abroad through its AARNet-support cross-Pacific link from Sydney to Los Angeles.

Just as medical scanners now employ techniques first used in radio astronomy to synthesize multi-dimensional images from many "slices" through human tissue, e-VLBI holds the promise of providing networking lessons that might be applied across a wide range of disciplines.