The people of ASTRON and NOVA in Dwingeloo work every day to unravel the secrets of the universe. Driven by curiosity and passion, they bring the unknown closer.
In four weekly episodes, documentary makers Ronald Pras and Marjolein Lauret show what drives the people of ASTRON and NOVA to look beyond our imagination.
In the first episode we meet Carla Baldovin and Tammo Jan Dijkema.
Dijkema is all about the ones and the zeros: he writes the software for the radio telescopes. In this way, weak radio signals can be converted into images and data. Without that software, the signals from space would simply remain unreadable.
But Dijkema’s great love is the old Dwingeloo telescope on the ASTRON site. He can regularly be found there as a volunteer. “I actually do too much hobby,” he winks. Dijkema always comes up with a solution to keep the 56-year-old telescope working. “With new electronics and a new receiver you can make such a piece of steel work again.”
The ‘tinkering’ with the old telescope turned out to be Columbus’s egg to get the Westerbork telescope working again. The fourteen telescopes, so called because of their location at the former Camp Westerbork, were the showpiece of radio astronomy for fifty years. Only 12 dishes have been deployed in 2022.
To make weak signals visible and amplify them, telescopes must reduce their own electronic noise as much as possible. Therefore, receivers are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero. “That costs energy and money. That is why only two dishes are still working.”
Through his ‘hobby’, Dijkema discovered that a tiny transistor of only 0.2 mm can amplify radio signals. This means that heavy cooling is no longer necessary.
But that mini transistor must be soldered to a printed circuit board. “In the depths of the ASTRON building we found an old machine that can do that.”
Colleague Geert Vastenhoud learned to operate it. “We are actually all inventors here,” Dijkema laughs.
But LOFAR is also getting an upgrade. It consists of tens of thousands of small antennas that together form the largest telescope in the world. The central heart is located between Exloo and Buinen, and is connected to antennas spread across the Netherlands and abroad: from Sweden to Bulgaria.
Carla Baldovin leads the operation to improve the unique telescope. “We will soon be able to observe four times wider and twenty times sharper. Data processing will also be forty times faster: from weeks to hours.”
The episodes can be seen on June 5, 12, 19 and 26, after Drenthe Nu.
Watch the first episode of ‘Explorers of the Universe’ here