Bear Lake Radio Telescope
Wednesday, 19th October 2005 by Alex Turnbull
This is the Bear Lake Radio Telescope outside of Moscow, and for such a big thing it was incredibly hard to track down any information about it.
Initially I had no idea what it was called, but after some extensive Googling I located a page which claimed this is a TNA-1500 radio telescope with a 64 metre diameter. It doesn't look quite that big to me, but it certainly isn't far off.
Supposedly there are several other telescopes which alongside this one make up the Russian Deep Space Network. The same page I mentioned above says they're located at Ussuriisk, Kalyasin, Yevpatoria and Shchelkovo. Unfortunately only Shchelkovo is in high-res, but after lengthy scrolling around I simply cannot see it for the life of me.
Mind you, the page was written in 1996...
Thanks to Sven.
Update: Chad found the Shchelkovo telescopes, and there's tons of them! Three are shown side by side in our bonus thumbnail, and there's also one with a very cool shadow too. Thanks Chad 🙂
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
If you use the Shchelkovo link, and scroll two screens North and about half a screen West, there is a large dish there. Doesn’t look quite as big as the Bear Lake one, but still pretty big.
I think this is Parkes, from that movie “The Dish.”
A satellite dish…… in Russia…… with no information about it on the web…… how odd! This internet thingy is useless isn’t it?
Where’s the huge row of telescopes they use in films, like Independance Day? SETI I think it’s called…
Bing, here’s the SETI telescope: Arecibo Radio Telescope. Not high res though I’m afraid.
I think Bing means the bit at the beginning of Contact. Loads of relatively small telescopes in the desert somewhere. I know the ones he means but dont know where it is – whats that big State east of california where all the Area 51 type stuff goes on – its probably there.
I believe Bing was referring to the VLA telescope (actually a radio interferometer) located in New Mexico. The VLA is comprised of 27 antennas arranged in a Y shape.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=vla%20telescope&sa=N&tab=wi
I think this is the one in Shchelkovo that KMD was talking about. You can barely see it in the middle but the shadow shows a satellite dish. View Placemark
I think this is where the VLA is located: View Placemark
Unfortunately it’s a low-res image. I’ve driven by here on US 60 before and you can see the dishes from the highway.
The VLA was the location in the movie Contact where the message is received.
SETI stands for the “Search for Extra-Terrastrial Intelligence”, which the VLA is probably rarely (if ever) used for.
Enjoy.
The VLA also makes an appearance at the beginning of the 1984 film, 2010.
Zvezdny Gorodok (aka Star City) is just outside of the high resolution area. Look east of the Bear Lake dish, past the airport. Not much to see, just a little town. It has been the base and training center for the Russian space program since 1960. Is still a semi-closed city (open for tours about once a month – really depressing), which might explain the lack of info on the internet. These dishes are visible from the road on the way out to the Gagarin Center. I guessed they were part of the flight communications network due to the proximity of base.
I can tell U some bout this! This is so called NIP-34(rus). It means Tracking Ground site. This NIP is used for tracking telemetry and uplinking cmmands to ISS or MKS (in russian) from mission control center in Korolev. And I’m not shure, but this nip provides connection between ground teams in MCC-M (CUP-M – Centr Upravlenija Poletami – Moskva) & MCC-Huston.
View Placemark And right in the center of this image is the MCC-M or CUP-M in Korolev. It’s a small town near Moscow. Where I used to work for a year.
Well, I worked in the building next to the dish (some 200 yards) Nothing too spooky … sorry 🙂 Long-distance cosmos (space) communication facility, for e.g. Mars missions.
Not sure if it was used in all those fascinating soviet’s missions to Mars, Moon, Venus, etc. in 60’s, or build after that.
Yes, it’s a huge dish. I was part of a science exchange which got to go inside of it. It was turned to point straight up and 40+ people were all milling around inside the dish under the radio horn. Very cool, and very nice piece of hardware on a scale that is hard to relate to unless you’re near it. One of those things which doesn’t look big because you’re used to seeing smaller dishes which look just like it. It’s on a whole different scale. It’s just down the road from Star City actually… co-located with a small airstrip which I believe was part of Moscow’s perimeter defensive ring. Least that’s the spiel we got.