The Armenian Arecibo

The Armenian Arecibo

The last time I went image hunting for this I could only find a few blurry postage-stamp images. The ROT-54/2.6 probably needs a better name for social media appeal (though it does also answer to Herouni Mirror Radio telescope, which is something of an improvement). Still, at least if you search for ROT-54/2.6 you'll now get a few good pictures, like this one. There's also a nice YouTube video here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq37U4jH8Ls

I can't easily find much more information on it, though from the same link as the picture below :

The first in the World Radio-Optical Telescope ROT-54/2.6 was designed and built during 1975-1985 by Radiophysics Research Institute (RRI, Yerevan, Armenia) on territory of RRI Aragats Scientific Centre (ASC, 100 ha) on Mount Aragats (Armenia) at altitude 1700m. The ROT-54/2.6 includes the Radiotelescope with Large Antenna of 54m in diameter and the Optical Telescope with diameter of mirror 2.6m and focus distance of 10m. The Large Antenna of ROT is the new type. Its Main mirror (54m) is fixed in ground and has hemispheric shape. Using aperture is 32m in diameter (surface using factor 0,6). The spherical aberrations of Main mirror are recompensed by special shape of Secondary (Small) mirror of 5m in diameter, which can rotate around the centre point of Main mirror.

So like Arecibo it's a spherical reflector which uses 32m of its 54m dish to collect photons. Hence it's similar to Arecibo, though smaller. But that's where the similarities end. First, it's a lot smaller, but the frequency range is much greater than Arecibo (1-300 GHz according to Wikipedia, compared to Arecibo's maximum of 10 GHz). It also covers pretty much the entire full hemisphere, unlike Arecibo's dish which is only the bottom tenth of so of the sphere. And the design of the mount for the receivers is completely different - Arecibo uses a platform suspended on high-tension cables; Herouni has a tripod structure which intersects the dish and uses an optical telescope (itself 2.6m in diameter, which is not so small !) as a counterweight.

As to how good it is, I've absolutely no idea. I've never heard of a single publication from it so I'm inclined to guess "not very".

EDIT : The original image I used is now offline, so I replaced it with this one (which has been uploaded to this blog for safe keeping). I also found this PDF detailing the structural and technical parameters of the telescope, and also briefly describes how it was used to search for the Cosmic Microwave Background. The search was unsuccessful, leading to a brusque dismissal of the standard cosmology :

So there is only one explanation, that Relict radiation is absent in Universe, and it is that there never was any Big Bang [3, 4, 5] in Universe.

Nice telescope, shame about the science.