{"id":3890,"date":"2018-05-10T01:11:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-09T23:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/from-srt-to-sdsa-inauguration-under-nasas-auspices\/"},"modified":"2018-05-10T01:11:00","modified_gmt":"2018-05-09T23:11:00","slug":"from-srt-to-sdsa-inauguration-under-nasas-auspices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/from-srt-to-sdsa-inauguration-under-nasas-auspices\/","title":{"rendered":"From SRT to SDSA, Inauguration under NASA’s Auspices"},"content":{"rendered":"

The two-day event saw the participation of major scientific institutions and their top representatives: William H. Gerstenmaier<\/strong> for NASA, Roberto Battiston<\/strong> and Salvatore Viviano<\/strong> for ASI, Nichi D\u2019Amico<\/strong> and Emilio Molinari<\/strong> for INAF, Maria Del Zompo<\/strong> for the University of Cagliari, Raffaele Paci<\/strong> for the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, IWC Replica Watches all accompanied by many colleagues who are too numerous to mention here. Also present were the Prefect of Cagliari Tiziana Giovanna Costantino<\/strong>, the mayors of San Basilio, Silius, Selargius, and Villasalto. In short, many important people but, thankfully, many more ordinary people, such as university students and many citizens who registered for the event. Beyond the necessary but incomplete mentions of those present, what we, as INAF, want to clarify to the public is what this monumental change truly entails. <\/p>\n

Until today, you have known the Sardinia Radio Telescope<\/strong> as \u201cSRT<\/strong>,\u201d one of the largest and most powerful radio telescopes in the world, essentially a giant dish similar to the TV ones we have on our roofs, with the difference that the electromagnetic waves it receives come from \u201cnatural\u201d celestial bodies like stars and galaxies, rather than from artificial satellites.<\/p>\n

As of today, the antenna is officially part of, as mentioned above, the Deep Space Network<\/strong> of the NASA<\/strong>. Despite the name, the DSN deals with \u201cdeep space<\/strong>\u201d in the \u201chuman<\/strong>\u201d sense of the term, meaning that area of the solar system that, as ASI President Battiston specified, extends beyond 500,000 km from Earth: practically everything beyond the Moon (for astronomers, however, \u201cdeep space\u201d means galaxies billions of light-years away, like those photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope). <\/p>\n

The task of SDSA<\/strong> will be to track interplanetary probes<\/strong> that roam the Solar System to receive<\/strong> valuable information and images from distant worlds, but it will also need to be able to send<\/strong> information and commands to these probes to enable them to conduct science and optimize resources on their long, one-way journey. This will require, as explained multiple times during the two-day event, an antenna capable of emitting electromagnetic signals powerful enough to reach beyond the Solar System, necessitating many safety precautions and much maintenance. SDSA will thus be one of the very few antennas in the world capable of communicating far, far from home. But not only that, the guarantee of stable space telecommunications<\/strong> as capacious as those we have, for example, on our smartphones, will allow for an ever-greater probability of success for human missions in space, such as those planned for the Moon<\/strong> and Mars<\/strong>, for now. <\/p>\n

All of this, dear readers, has a name: \u201cexploration<\/strong>.\u201d It is the going beyond that has made humans, for better or worse, the protagonists of the last hundred thousand years of the (much longer) history of the world. Astronomically and geologically speaking, we are almost nothing, yet it is the curiosity to know what is beyond the hill that has driven us to where we are today. Knowing that Sardinia – although not able today to promise economic or employment miracles – is part of this process of expanding knowledge<\/strong> and technological progress<\/strong> cannot help but evoke in us, at least those of us at INAF, ASI, NASA, the Sardinia Region \u2013 those of us who have believed and still believe in this adventure – a distilled emotion, pride, and hope to discover new and astonishing things in the near future, a hope that we know is, rather, a certainty. This is the emotion we would like to convey to all those who, understandably, ask us: why invest in astrophysical research or space sciences? <\/p>\n

Let us always remember, as researchers and as ordinary citizens, that the beauty of science is precisely the discovery at the expense of certainty. The destruction of old theories that were believed to be certain and the capitalization on the inevitable errors that researchers inevitably make should be the rule of a scientific world that today seems instead to follow outdated bibliographies slavishly for the sole purpose of career advancement. Instruments like SRT\/SDSA are now available to the scientific world to enable, with their precision and power in their respective fields of operation, those technical and scientific advances that are already bringing us to face evidence that we consider irrefutable. We will do so, however, only until the day we progress towards even more sophisticated instruments that will be able to change the rules of the game. For now, we are writing those rules, in our small way, too. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From today, the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) can also be officially used in Sardinia Deep Space Antenna (SDSA) mode and effectively enters, under the management of the Space Agency, into NASA’s Deep Space Network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oa-cagliari.inaf.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}