As the doors open to the first scientific observational projects with the closing of the Call for Proposal for the Early Science program, the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) confirms itself as an antenna with great international potential.
The official visit to Cagliari by Keyur Patel, Director of the Interplanetary Network Directorate at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Project Manager of the Dawn probe, has just concluded.
After an official meeting with the president of INAF, Nichi D’Amico, and the president of ASI, Roberto Battiston, Patel, accompanied by Alaudin Bhanji and Pete Hames (also from JPL) and ASI’s Scientific Director Enrico Flamini, visited Cagliari in recent days to tour the Sardinia Radio Telescope and the brand-new technological development laboratories at the new headquarters of INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari.
Alaudin Bhanji, Enrico Flamini, Pete Hames, and Keyur Patel during the visit to SRT.
The purpose of the visit was, as Patel himself explains, “a technical assessment of the potential use of SRT in space telecommunications, particularly in receiving (what is called downlink) information from interplanetary probes, especially in view of future space missions planned for Mars starting in 2020.”
SRT could thus become part of the DSN (Deep Space Network), also due to the simplicity of such an operation: “Building a new antenna is one thing,” says Patel, “having one already ready, available with few modifications, and of large size like SRT is another.”
The involvement of the American agency in SRT observations could be almost “painless” from a management perspective. If the agreement between the prestigious entities goes through, it is more than likely that JPL will exploit part of the 20% of observational time already guaranteed to ASI by an agreement with INAF. Part of this percentage of antenna usage time could be used by ASI to monitor nearby celestial bodies that are potentially dangerous to Earth, such as asteroids, meteors, comets, and space debris, in a strategic planetary security perspective. Another significant portion of time could instead be used for receiving signals from interplanetary probes. ASI is already the main partner of JPL in the field of solar system exploration with robotic probes, a collaboration that could be strengthened by the inclusion of SRT in the DSN network. A sector in which SRT had already shown its potential in November by intercepting a weak signal from the Rosetta probe.
“The Sardinian antenna,” says Enrico Flamini – can become of fundamental importance, both for its size and for the quality of its reception, in increasing the quantity and quality of data from future space missions. And as the project manager of the Cassini probe, if we could intercept the last part of the Cassini probe’s life, I would be a very happy man “.