Founded in 1960, this research facility is Canada's largest radio astronomy observatory. Built at a radio quiet site in the Okanagan Valley in south central British Columbia, it presently employs three different instruments - a 26-metre fully steerable dish, a seven-antenna
aperture synthesis array and a solar radio flux monitor. The facility is operated by the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics.
Under construction is a new Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, which is described in brief below.
When construction began, the Penticton Western News ran an informative article on the new telescope which is reproduced further below.
The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is an interferometric radio telescope under construction at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, Canada which will consist of four 100 x 20 metre cylinders (roughly the size and shape of snowboarding half-pipes) populated with 1024 radio receivers sensitive at 400–800 MHz. The telescope's low-noise amplifiers are being built with components adapted from the cellphone industry and its digital processing makes use of high-end computer gaming technology. The telescope has no moving parts and observes half of the sky each day as the Earth turns. CHIME is a partnership among the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto and the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory.
From Wiki
Scientists stoked about new telescope
near Penticton
by Joe Fries - Penticton Western News
posted Jan 26, 2013 at 8:00 AM
Work began this week on a trial version of a cutting-edge radio telescope near Penticton that will look back billions of years into the history of the universe to give scientists a better understanding of its future.
The $11-million Canadian Hydrogen Intensity-Mapping Experiment should help explain why and how the universe is expanding, according to Dr. Mark Halpern, an astrophysicist at UBC, one of three schools participating in the project at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near White Lake.
“Something happened to make our universe so big and so old, and something’s happening now to make (its expansion) accelerate,” Halpern said.
“It’s the basic working of what makes the universe be the way it is that we’re trying to understand.”
The telescope will analyze electromagnetic radiation to map the distribution of hydrogen – one of the earliest, most abundant elements – in different parts of the universe. Radiation coming from the most distant galaxies will allow researchers to peer back billions of years into the past, and they can then deduce how the universe expanded.
Halpern said dark energy is believed to be a key factor that’s driven expansion, although little is known about it.
“Dark to astronomers just means it’s an object that doesn’t give off light, so I can’t see it,” Halpern explained. “It’s an energy density that’s causing the universe to expand. It sounds cool, but it just means we don’t know what it is.”
The full telescope will feature five half-pipes, each about 100 metres long and 20 metres wide, made of wire mesh that will collect the electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio waves. The data will then be analyzed at partner labs at UBC, McGill University and the University of Toronto.
Work is only underway now, however, on a smaller test telescope that will be about a 10th of the size of the full array. It should go into operation in April, and if it works as planned, the full-scale model will go up in late 2014, Halpern said.
From the Penticton Western News