On 19/07/2011 03:43, Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 18/07/2011 8:50 PM, eric gisse wrote:
Yousuf wrote in
:

Russia Launches Long-Delayed Deep Space Radio Telescope | Giant Space
Telescopes | Radio Astronomy& Deep Space Exploration | Space.com
http://www.space.com/12329-russia-la...nt-radio-teles
cope.html



207,000 miles to 621 miles is a bit of an orbital swing.

I've never heard of this. This is neat.

I'm not even sure why they are doing such an elliptical orbit like that?
Any advantages for viewing angles or stuff like that?

Allows it to cover a decent range of baselines relative to ground based
scopes when operated as an interferometer (assuming that their orbit
determination is precise enough to get the correlators to lock-in).

The ground based VLBI network is stuck with the pattern formed by where
the various big steerable dishes happen to have been built.

Regards,
Martin Brown