Mills Cross radio telescope
Telescopio en cruz de Mills (Mills Cross)
- Date
- 1953-1954 · confidence high
- Place
- Fleurs, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Credited to
- Bernard Mills
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What it is
A radio telescope made of two long arms of antennas laid out in a cross, combining their signals to get a narrow beam at lower cost than a single dish. It mapped radio sources in the southern sky at high resolution.
Chris Christiansen built an antenna grating (the 'Chris Cross') at Potts Hill in the early 1950s; Mills proposed the cross design soon afterwards.
What it led to
- aperture-synthesis radio telescopes such as Molonglo
- radio mapping of the southern sky
- the development of interferometry in radio astronomy