Buryatia: Siberian Solar Radio Telescope (SSRT)
This wasn’t in any guidebooks or online, but was a suggestion by the driver – and, boy, was it worth it! An absolutely surreal photogenic setting of 254 solar radio radars set in a cross position at the foothills of the Sayan mountains – one of the largest radar research centers in the world. All 254 of them point and follow the sun all day long, humming and buzzing like robots. Absolutely desolate and abandoned feel with not a single visitor or employee in sight – I felt like ET calling home. Not to paraphrase the science, here’s what Wikipedia says about it: ” SSRT is a crossed interferometer, consisting of two arrays of 128×128 parabolic antennas 2.5 meters in diameter each, spaced equidistantly at 4.9 meters and oriented in the E-W and N-S directions. The main maxima of the radio telescope’s multidirectional beam are arranged at intervals in some excess of the Sun’s apparent size at the instrument’s working wavelengths l = 5,2 sm. The length of each linear baselines of the interferometer is 622.3 meters.”
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