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| Description | The Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), owned and operated by ASTRON in The Netherlands, has 14 fully-steerable parabolic reflectors, distributed in an East-West configuration of 2700m length. It is equipped with a sensitive receiver package providing almost continuous coverage at decimetre and centimetre wavelengths as well as frequency agility. Coupled to its flexible half-million channel correlator, and its modern pulsar and VLBI backends, the WSRT continues to be a uniquely capable facility in the world that is consistently oversubscribed and draws a wide international user base. The WSRT will see its next major upgrade in 2014 when a 21cm receiver system, “Apertif”, consisting of phased-array feeds and a digital beamformer, developed at ASTRON, will be installed at the focal plane of 12 (out of 14) of the WSRT dishes, replacing the current Multi-Frequency Frontends (MFFEs). With Apertif, many beams can be formed simultaneously at each dish (nominally 37), enlarging the instantaneous Field-of-View of the 12 WSRT dishes to 8 square degrees (an increase of a factor of 30 compared to the current WSRT) and 16384 spectral channels can be formed over a 300 MHz contiguous bandpass that can be tuned anywhere between 1000 and 1750 MHz. |
| URL | http://www.astron.nl/radio-observatory/astronomers/wsrt-astronomers |
| Status | Operational since 1970 Being upgraded since 2014 |
| Scientific Domains | Physical Sciences and Engineering |
| RI Categorization | Telescopes |
| Location | Schattenberg 1, Zwiggelte, 9433, Netherlands |
| MERIL URL | http://portal.meril.eu/meril/view/facilitys/15422 |
