Astrophiz 70: Dr Jamie Stevens - The ATCA

Astrophiz 70: Dr Jamie Stevens ~ The ATCA
PLUS: 'What's up Doc' with Dr @ianfmusgrave
Listen here: Astrophiz – Astrophiz70

This is the third of 6 ‘Astrotour’ episodes of Astrophiz, where we are publishing recordings of interviews I did on a two and a half thousand kilometre tour of five of Australia’s finest Eastern state radio and optical observatories.

Today’s feature interview is with Dr Jamie Stevens, CSIRO’s Senior Systems Scientist for the Australian Telescope Compact Array, a unique mobile array of 6 x 22 metre dishes. Jamie tells us all about this beautiful facility, it’s technology and how it creates rich data sets for a huge number of researchers and gives us an idea of some of the current ATCA projects.

In our regular segment for astrophotographers and observers, Dr Ian 'Astroblog’ Musgrave presents ‘What’s Up Doc?’. In this episode he tells us about the planets and comets currently visible to the naked eye and in his tangent he reveals a comet is approaching the Parker Solar Probe.

IN THE NEWS:

.1. The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is slowly dying.


.2. Via The Chinese Academy of Sciences Newsroom: Fusion reactor reaches 100 million degrees Centigrade, enough to initiate hydrogen fusion (for a very short amount of time). It’s a breakthrough in the quest to produce clean, inexhaustible fusion energy.



.3. Finally, with Opportunity not phoning home from Mars, I’ve just booked another interview for early next year with Richard Stephenson who leads the control room at Australia’s DSN station at Tidbinbilla.


NASA has three DSN stations, one at Tidbinbilla in Australia managed by the CSIRO, one at Madrid and one in California, sited about 120 degrees apart so NASA can schedule contact with missions throughout the day and night as the earth rotates.
For new listeners didn’t hear our first interview about operations at the Deep Space network with Richard, go to tinyurlDOTcomFORWARDSLASHrichardnasa all lower case, all one word, it’s a fabulous episode called ‘Talking to Spacecraft’