The works related to the investment concerning montage and installation of the LBA and HBA aerials of the LOFAR station by Skanska in the Didactic and Research Station in Bałdy will finish at the end of August this year. The scope of our task includes montage and demolition of a montage hall, performance and installation of lattice as well as montage of the LBA and HBA aerials – says Szymon Wasilewski, Project's Manager, Skanska. Moreover, the company is going to perform the bringing of concentric wires from the LBA and HBA aerials to the container which processes data.
The montage of the smaller LBA aerials, which is being conducted by our company, is composed of several stages. The first of them consists in preparation and alignment of the plot with the accuracy to 3 cm. Then, after demarcation of the location for receivers, geofibres are set in those places. Moreover, a lattice is placed on it and aerial is situated in the middle of it. 4 guy wires, which are anchored in the ground, are carried from the installed aerial – comments Szymon Wasilewski. The similar process of montage will take place in the case of installation of big aerials.
The installation will be launched in the second half of August and the aim of the mounted receivers is registration of the radio radiation coming from the space. It is not the first investment conducted by Skanska within the building of the radio astronomy station at University of Warmia and Mazury. The company also realized fiber-optic and energetic terminal between the administrational structures of the University of Warmia and Mazury in Bałdy where there is a node of PIONIR and observation field of the LOFAR station.
The radio radiation, which will be received by aerials, is not very well researched and it has low frequencies. It is sent from very distant places of the universe. Maybe we will be able to receive the signal thanks to the project for which the humanity has been waiting for ages – says prof Andrzej Krankowski from the University of Warmia and Mazury.
The radio astronomy station is located in Bałdy and it is the only station (among three planned ones) which was realized within the POLFAR project – Radio inferometer with a low frequency and building of three stations of the LOFAR system in Poland. Its owner is the POLFAR consortium, the member of which are i.a. Jagiellonian University in Cracow, University of Warmia and Mazury, PAN Space Research Center, University of Mikołaj Kopernik, University in Zielona Góra and PAN Mikołaj Kopernik Astronomic Center. This entity received ca. 26 million zlotys from the Ministry of Science and Tertiary Education two years ago for creation of 3 radio astronomy stations which are supposed to be a part of the LOFAR system, that is a multi-aerial radio telescope. It is composed of 25 000 aerials which are divided into 36 stations located in the whole Europe. The central agglomeration of aerials is situated in Holland.