Construcción de radiotelescopio amateur para pruebas de diseño de receptor

Abstract

There are two deep-space antennas in Argentina, one belonging to the European Space Agency and another to the Chinese National Space Administration. We introduce our project to contribute to the initiative of the Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (the interlocutor with both agencies), which is the adequacy of these antennas to allow their usage as radio telescopes. We seek to take advantage of the state of the art in engineering presented by both instruments through the design of a back-end that, after getting the appropriate permissions, would be integrated into the acquisition chain. However, in order to move towards the final design, we first need to validate the prototype using our own measurements. Therefore, we are building a small radio telescope capable of detecting the emission in the L band (1.42 GHz), this frequency was selected because of the abundance and sharpness of the hydrogen lines in our galaxy. In the future, an instrumental characterization of the system is going to be obtained by measuring the noise temperature, sensitivity and spatial resolution, which will allow us to check for the correct functioning of the equipment.