Students tweeting telescope takeover

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 12 August 2009 06:44

Science - Space

Twitter’s reach seemingly knows no bounds, with the popular social networking site taking its millions of devotees around the world into space today as a group of Australian school students take over the famous Parkes telescope to explore for pulsars and post their results to Twitter.

Working with scientists from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), students from three Melbourne high schools will drive the famous Parkes telescope from the Victorian Space Science Education (VSSEC) in Melbourne and use it to make real observations of the small spinning stars called pulsars.

The session for the students is part of an ongoing program called ‘PULSE@Parkes’ that is giving students around Australia the chance to do real science with a large, professional, radio telescope.
 
The program is an initiative of CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF), which operates Parkes and other radio telescopes in rural New South Wales.

As well as being a first-time event for Twitter, the student and CSIRO initiative has attracted interest from NASA, with its scientists signing up to Twitter to watch the students in action.

Scientists who use NASA’s Fermi space telescope to study pulsars work collaboratively with researchers using the Parkes telescope. They are interested in what the students from Footscray City Secondary College, Braemar College and Strathmore Secondary College in Melbourne will find, and have signed up for the Twitter updates.

The CSIRO plans to build on the experience of PULSE@Parkes to develop remote-observing education programs for the Australian Square Kilometre Pathfinder, ASKAP, which CSIRO is now developing for operation in Western Australia.
 
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