S&TNEWSWIRE

LATE-BREAKING ASTRONOMICAL NEWS

Pathfinder Reaches Mars

(ARES VALLIS, MARS) In the predawn darkness of July 4th, the red planet gained
two new inhabitants: NASAs Mars Pathfinder and its six-wheeled companion, Sojourner (seen here before deployment). A week after
bouncing onto this ancient, boulder-strewn floodplain, the lander and rover had surveyed the surroundings with stereo cameras, radioed
weather conditions, and sampled rock and soil chemistry. Pathfinders first results will appear in next months issue. Courtesy NASA/JPL.

First Images from Orbiting Radio Dish

(KANAGAWA, JAPAN) An orbiting radio telescope has success-

fully linked up with Earthbound instruments to produce its

first high-resolution images.
Astronomers have long combined the signals from separate
radio telescopes to better resolve structure in cosmic radio
sources. With individual antennas spanning the globe, very long
baseline interferometry (VLBI) routinely provides the resolution,
if not the sensitivity, of a radio telescope almost as large as the
Earth. However, even that has failed to resolve a number of enigmatic objects such as quasars and active galaxies.
So an international consortium led by Japans Institute of
VLBA alone

VLBA + HALCA

Beam
size

ISAS

Beam
size

16

September 1997 Sky & Telescope

Space and Astronautical Science built the Highly Advanced

Laboratory for Communications and Astronomy (HALCA), a
spacecraft with an 8-meter-wide radio telescope (July issue,
page 25). HALCAs eccentric, six-hour orbit reaches as far as
21,000 kilometers from Earth, roughly tripling the width, and
therefore the resolution, of ground-based VLBI networks.
The technique has been exploited before. A member of the
Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) was used as
a radio telescope in sync with several ground-based instruments in the 1980s. But HALCA is the first operating satellite
designed expressly for radio astronomy. (A Russian predecessor
remains to be completed).
Astronomers hope to use HALCA to
dissect the jets and lobes of sources like
the quasar Q1156+295 (shown at left),
whose core and jet were scanned by the
spacecraft on June 5th in tandem with
the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA).
The ovals in the lower-left corners show
how the resolution improves with the
satellites addition. A July 4th newsletter
from the VLBI Space Observatory Program reports that two of HALCAs three
receivers are working better than anticipated, although the third designed in
part for water-vapor emissions from masers circling black holes has somehow
0.01 arcsecond
lost 90 percent of its sensitivity.

1997 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.