Australia Telescope Compact Array ATCA is a radio telescope operated by CSIRO at the Paul Wild 1988

Описание: The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), located at the Paul Wild Observatory near Narrabri on Gomeroi Country, is a set of six 22-m diameter dishes (‘antennas’) for collecting radio waves from space and is the only telescope of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Costing A$50 million, the Compact Array was built to keep Australia at the forefront of radio astronomy. It was an ambitious project, with the aim of building a world-class array with 80 per cent Australian content. In 1983 the then Chief of CSIRO Radiophysics, Bob Frater, selected engineer John Brooks as the man who could make this happen and appointed him as Project Manager. Under John’s leadership, this goal was achieved, culminating in the opening of the Australia Telescope Compact Array by Prime Minister Bob Hawke on 2 September 1988.

The ATCA was designed and built in Australia, with high content of locally built components. The leading edge engineering that went into it has had spin-off benefits for local industry, especially in communications and the space industry. The ATCA is part of the Australian Telescope (AT) where its six receivers at Narrabri are linked to the Mopra antenna (also 22-m in diameter) near Coonabarabran and the 64-m diameter radiotelescope at Parkes. Such linking creates a virtual telescope hundreds of kilometres in diameter, able to see much more detail than any of the individual telescopes. Since 1989, the Australia Telescope has been run as a national facility ‘ the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) ‘ open to use by Australian and overseas astronomers.
Five of the Compact Array's six dishes sit on a three kilometre stretch of wide-gauge rail track running east–west, the sixth antenna is located three kilometres further west; there is also a 214-metre track running north–south.
The antennas are not moved along the track while observations are taking place, but in between observations – every few weeks or so; they move along the track at four kilometres per hour, a fast walking pace.
Signals received by the six antennas are combined to give a high-resolution radio 'picture'; this technique is known as 'interferometry'.
The telescope can receive radio signals from three millimetres to 20 centimetres long.
It can be pointed with an accuracy of better than two arcseconds – the width of a finger seen from one kilometre away.
The telescope is an array of six identical 22-metre (72 ft) diameter dishes, which commonly operate in aperture synthesis mode to produce radio images. Five of the dishes can be moved along a three-kilometre (2 mi) railway track oriented east-west. The sixth antenna is situated three kilometres west of the end of the main track. Each dish weighs about 270 tonnes (270 long tons; 300 short tons).

The Compact Array is a part of the Australia Telescope National Facility network of radio telescopes. The array is frequently operated together with other CSIRO telescopes, the 64-metre (210 ft) dish at the Parkes Observatory and a single 22-metre (72 ft) dish at Mopra (near Coonabarabran), to form a very long baseline interferometry array.

The children's/teen's television adventure series Sky Trackers as filmed in this facility in 1993, with the radio telescopes being prominently featured.