Advanced Technologies for Radio Telescopes in Mexico and the UK

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This project has two main components. In the first, electronics hardware that has been developed in the UK for a large radio telescope project, the Square Kilometre Array, will be used on a new Mexican telescope, the Large Millimetre Telescope (LMT), situated on a mountain top in Mexico. The grant will pay for three researchers, one in the UK and two in Mexico, to develop software to process data from two high frequency radio receivers on the LMT. This will allow more detailed observations of radio emission from stars and star-forming regions in our own Galaxy as well as in external galaxies. More importantly, as this is an international development project, it will train the Mexican scientists in the use of the latest high-speed digital technology, which has applications both in astronomy, in science generally, and in commercial applications. The second part of the project will focus on the use of redundant satellite communications antennas for radio astronomy. Mexican engineers will build a feed horn (the component in a large antenna that actually captures the radio waves) for an antenna in the UK that is being converted from communications to astronomy use. With the advice of UK scientists, they will also study how to convert a similar antenna in Mexico. This should lead to the possibility of a complete network of new radio telescope in Mexico and Latin America, co-operating with similar arrays in Europe and Africa.