Category Archives: Radio Astronomy

Search for Military Satellite Finds One NASA Lost Instead

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[Scott Tilley] was searching for radio signals from the Air Force’s top-secret ZUMA satellite. He found something that is — we think — much more interesting. He found NASA’s lost satellite called IMAGE. You are probably wondering why it is interesting that someone listening for one satellite found another one. You see, NASA declared IMAGE dead in 2005. It went silent unexpectedly and did not complete its mission to image the magnetosphere.

NASA did a failure review and concluded that in all likelihood a single event upset caused a power controller to trip. A single event upset, or SEU, is …read more

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See Satellites with a Simple Radio Telescope

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Have you got a spare Dish Network antenna lying about? They’re not too hard to come by, either curbside on bulk waste day or perhaps even on Freecycle. If you can lay hands on one, you might want to try this fun radio telescope build.

Now, don’t expect much from [Justin]’s minimalist build. After all, you’ll be starting with a rather small dish and an LNB for the Ku band, so you won’t be doing serious radio astronomy. In fact, the BOM doesn’t include a fancy receiver  – just a hacked satellite finder. The idea is to just get a …read more

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Listening to Jupiter on a DIY Radio

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By Jove, he built a radio!

If you want to get started with radio astronomy, Jupiter is one of the easiest celestial objects to hear from Earth. [Vasily Ivanenko] wanted to listen, and decided to build a modular radio receiver for the task. So far he’s written up six of the eight planned blog posts.

The system uses an LNA, a direct conversion receiver block, and provides audio output to a speaker, output to a PC soundcard, and a processed connection for an analog to digital converter. The modules are well-documented and would be moderately challenging to reproduce.

NASA maintains …read more

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Listen to the Sun, Saturn, and the Milky Way with Your Own Radio Telescope

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Students from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research combined a commercial satellite dish, a satellite finder and an Arduino, and produced a workable radio telescope. The satellite dish provides the LNB (low noise block) and the associated set-top box is used only for power.  Their LNB employs an aluminum foil shield to block extraneous signals.

In addition to the hardware, the team built Python software to analyze the data and show several practical applications. They used known geostationary satellites to calibrate the signal from the finder (digitized by the Arduino) to determine power per unit voltage. They also …read more

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The Tiny Radio Telescope

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Radio telescopes are one of the more high-profile pieces of scientific apparatus. There is an excitement to stories of radio astronomers of old probing the mysteries of the Universe on winter nights in frigid cabins atop massive parabolas, even if nowadays their somewhat more fortunate successors do the same work from the comfort of their labs using telescopes that may be on the other side of the world.

You might think if you look at the Arecibo Observatory, Lovell Telescope, or other famous pieces of apparatus, that this is Big Science, out of reach for mere mortals such as yourself …read more

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All Quiet on the West Virginia Border: The National Radio Quiet Zone

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Ask a hundred people why they like to escape to the forest and you’ll probably get a hundred reasons, but chances are good that more than a few will say they seek the peace and quiet of the woods. And while the woods can be a raucous place between the wildlife and the human visitors, it is indeed a world apart from a busy city street, at least in the audio frequencies. But on the EM spectrum, most forests are nearly as noisy as your average cube farm, and that turns out to be a huge problem if you happen …read more

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