Westerbork Radio Observatory

Westerbork Radio Observatory

(vess -ter-bork) An observatory at Westerbork, near Groningen in the northern Netherlands. It has a highly sensitive aperture synthesis system (the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, or WSRT), which went into operation in 1970 and is run by the Netherlands Foundation for Radio Astronomy. Fourteen 25-meter radio dishes lie on a line running east-west and 2.8 km in length. (Originally there were 12 dishes on a 1.6-km baseline.) Four of the dishes are movable: two at one end of the line and a further two nearer the center of the line and the ten fixed dishes. It can observe at frequencies between 250 MHz and 8.65 GHz.