Advanced Technologies for Radio Telescopes in Mexico and the UK

这个项目有两个主要组成部分。首先，英国为大型射电望远镜项目--平方公里阵列--开发的电子硬件将用于位于墨西哥山顶的新墨西哥望远镜--大毫米望远镜(LMT)。这笔拨款将用于支付三名研究人员，一名在英国，两名在墨西哥，开发软件来处理来自LMT上两个高频无线电接收器的数据。这将使我们能够更详细地观测恒星和我们银河系内以及外部星系中恒星形成区域的射电辐射。更重要的是，由于这是一个国际开发项目，它将培训墨西哥科学家使用最新的高速数字技术，这种技术在天文学、一般科学和商业应用中都有应用。该项目的第二部分将侧重于利用多余的卫星通信天线进行射电天文学。墨西哥工程师将为英国正在从通信转换为天文用途的天线制造馈电喇叭(大型天线中实际捕获无线电波的部件)。在英国科学家的建议下，他们还将研究如何在墨西哥改装类似的天线。这应该会导致在墨西哥和拉丁美洲建立一个完整的新射电望远镜网络的可能性，并与欧洲和非洲的类似阵列合作。

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.