RedCLARA News - 2004/2010
- María José López Pourailly
During TNC 2008, Networks will create a real-time virtual te
Members of the EXPReS project (Express Production Real-time e-VLBI Service) on May 22nd will use multiple data networks to connect telescopes in South America, North America, Africa and Europe to a central data correlator in the Netherlands, simulating a telescope over 13,000 kilometers in diameter. This real-time virtual telescope will be possible thanks to the capacities of the interconnected RedCLARA, GÉANT2, Netherlight, Belnet, Internet2 and StarLight advanced networks.
Telescopes in Chile, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, South Africa and Sweden simultaneously will observe a quasar 3C454.3 and will stream the data in real-time to JIVE (Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe) at a high bandwidth rate. There, the data will be correlated in real-time, and the results are going to be transmitted to Bruges, Belgium, as part of a live demonstration at the TERENA Networking Conference 2008 (that started on May 19th and will end in the 22nd).
Data from TIGO (Transportable Integrated Geodetic Observatory, University of Concepción - UDEC) located the southern city of Concepción, Chile, will be sent via REUNA (Red Universitaria Nacional - Chilean National Research and Education Network, NREN) and RedCLARA networks in South America to GÉANT2, operated by EXPReS member NREN DANTE, and then via Netherlight, operated by EXPReS member SURFnet. Data from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico will be routed via Centennial, AMPATH, AtlanticWave, NGIX, Internet2 and StarLight networks to GÉANT2 and Netherlight.
Using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), astronomers will use multiple radio telescopes to simultaneously observe the same region of sky. The data collected by each telescope will be sampled, synchronized and correlated for every possible telescope combination. VLBI can generate images of cosmic radio sources with up to a hundred times better resolution than images from the best optical telescopes. EXPReS, a three-year projected funded by the European Commission, is networking the telescopes to send the data electronically and correlate it in real-time. Called e-VLBI, this process eliminates the shipping of disks and provides astronomers with correlated data in a timely fashion, allowing them to exploit transient astronomical events such as supernovae and gamma ray bursts.
It must be highlighted that this is the first time that an experiment of this importance is carried out between Chile and Europe and, most of all, with such a broad bandwidth. For the Chilean NREN, REUNA, this is a major challenge in terms of cooperation and experimentation in the advanced networks and to achieve it, it has been hardly working with TIGO-UDEC and RedCLARA.
For more information, please visit:
Network Conference TERENA 2008: http://tnc2008.terena.org/
EXPReS: http://www.expres-eu.org/
TIGO: http://www.tigo.cl/
