How one woman is racing to restart her uncle's spectacular scientific legacy: a radio-optical telescope left in limbo on the slopes of Armenia's highe

The Fight To Save Armenia's Soviet Space Telescope

submited by

Style Pass

2023-05-30 09:30:07

How one woman is racing to restart her uncle's spectacular scientific legacy: a radio-optical telescope left in limbo on the slopes of Armenia's highest mountain.

The lonely control room in the photo above is an aesthetic holy grail for urban explorers. Unlike most empty, Instagram-famous Soviet-era buildings, however, this site has a chance of being restored once more into the hub of activity and scientific research that it once was as part of the Orgov Radio-Optical Telescope.

The 54-meter-wide Orgov telescope dish is one of the most sensitive of its kind in the world. Radio telescopes are used to study deep space by picking up faint radio waves given off by distant stars and galaxies that can be visualized into an image.

Views of deep space are usually limited by the space dust that obscures some objects from view, but radio telescopes can "see through" the dust, enabling them to record objects invisible to optical telescopes.

Radio telescopes have also impacted everyday life. An Australian radio telescope engineer used his expertise to fine-tune WiFi signals into the lightning-fast wireless Internet connections most of us enjoy today.