East Asian astronomers are building the world's largest radio telescope array to see the deep into the galaxy and black holes and more accurately determine the orbits of lunar probes such as China's Chang'e-1. This, according to reporter Wang Aihua of Xinhua.

The array, called the East Asia Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) consortium, consists of 19 radio telescopes from China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (ROK) that cover an area with a diameter of 6,000 kilometers from northern Japan's Hokkaido to western China's Kunming and Urumqi. The VLBI technology is widely used in radio astronomy and combines the observations simultaneously made by several telescopes to expand the diameter and increase magnification.

Shen Zhiqiang, secretary general of the East Asia VLBI consortium committee, told Xinhua Sunday, the consortium has carried out experimental observations and frequent academic exchanges since the idea came into being in 2003. One main task of the consortium is to improve the three-dimensional map of the Milky Way galaxy obtained by Japan's VERA (VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry), according to the project's development plan. Hideyuki Kobayashi, director of Japan's Mizusawa VERA Observatory, told Science Magazine in the U.S. earlier that the consortium would help astronomers obtain high quality data on galactic structures.

Full-scale observations of the consortium are scheduled to start in 2010, which will connect at least 12 Japanese and four Chinese stations, in addition to three Korean ones that are under construction. Shen said, "The actual number of telescopes included could change as the countries involved are building new ones plus the 65-meter-diameter radio telescope being built in Shanghai. In addition, Chinese astronomers have made huge success in applying VLBI technology to determine the orbit of Chang'e-1, China's first lunar probe." Shen's research team also used VLBI to find the most convincing proof so far that there is a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Currently, China's four telescopes participating in the consortium are still focusing on tracking the Chang'e-1 satellite, Shen said.

The China VLBI Network announced on January 20th that it successfully used the Internet to achieve high-speed data transmission called e-VLBI, an important direction for future VLBI technology development. Meanwhile, Korean and Japanese astronomers are cooperating to build in Seoul a correlator to integrate large amounts of data into high-resolution images, a fundamental preparation for the consortium. Radio telescopes differ from optical ones in that they use radio antennae to track and collect data from satellites and space probes. The first radio antenna used to identify astronomical radio sources was built by Karl Guthe Jansky, an engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories, in the early 1930s.