Teen Brigade: Youth Radio Station Helps Telescope To Track Space Junk
Australian astronomers have derived a catchy way to prevent catastrophic, multi-billion dollar space junk collisions - by listening in to the radio signals generated by stations like the popular youth network Triple J. The project spearheaded by Curtin University in Western Australia uses the newly operational Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), one of three precursor telescopes for the $2 billion Square Kilometre Array project, to detect radio waves reflecting off thousands of objects orbiting the earth. The study has already tracked radio waves from FM transmitters located near Perth and Geraldton bouncing off the International Space Station as it passed over Western Australia, approximately 500 kilometres above the Earth's surface. read more