Scientists were able to get a view of Tycho Crater measuring 1.4 billion pixels.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Radar technology is not only used to track aircraft. This technology can also be used to make a number of astronomical measurements, from the rotation of the Planet Venus to images of extraordinary objects in space.
Scientists use high-tech radar to display photos of the Moon. With this technology, scientists can get view Kawah Tycho 1.4 billion pixels in size. This photo shows the protruding side that lies on the southern lunar plateau.
The image covers an area of 200 by 175 kilometers (124 by 108 mi), corresponding to the full size of Tycho which stretches for 86 kilometers (53 mi). This image is an image of the moon with the highest resolution ever achieved.
The extraordinary image was likely using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and a technology called Syntheyic Aperture Radar (SAR). A completely globally controllable radio telescope, it sends signals that bounce off the surface of the Moon and back down to Earth when received, stored and analyzed into a full image.
“This is the largest synthetic aperture radar image we have produced to date with the help of our partners at Raytheon,” National Radio Astronomy Observatory Director Tony Beasly and Wakik president of Radio Astronomy at Associated Universitiew Inc said in a statement. Ilflscience, Tuesday (28/9).
He added that now more work lies ahead to improve these images. We can share more pictures from this project in the near future. The team hopes to show that this innovative work can do much more than what they have shown so far.
“Radar data like this has never been recorded before at this distance or resolution,” said Galen Watts, an engineer at Green Bank Oservatory.
He added that this had been done before at a distance of several hundred kilometers but not hundreds of thousands of kilometers from this project and not at a high resolution of about 1 meter at this distance. All of them require a lot of computing time. About 10 years ago, it took months of computing to get one picture from a receiver and maybe a year or so.
This approach could someday be used to create radio maps of the world far and further away, much like the gas giant moons. Not only that, the image of Tycho is the first of many images that will be released in the next few months.
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