The Australia Telescope National Facility

Abstract

The Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) is owned and operated by Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO. The ATNF supports research in radio astronomy and is used by astronomers all over the world. It also supports space-related activities, such as spacecraft tracking and communication, bi-static interplanetary radar and passive radar. The ATNF consists of four radio telescopes operating in the frequency range 0.5-115 GHz: the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), Mopra telescope, Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Parkes Radio Telescope. The telescopes can be combined with other telescopes in Australia and overseas (including antennas of the CSIRO-operated NASA facility, the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex) to form the Long Baseline Array: a continental-scale Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) telescope. This paper describes the technical specifications of these instruments and some recent science results.