09 AM | 12 Aug

Australian students tweeted telescope takeover.

Students from three Melbourne high schools  took control of CSIRO’s famous Parkes telescope in NSW using the internet  and posted their results on Twitter.

This is the first time the social networking site has been used to report their findings and already they have attracted international interest with NASA scientists signing up to watch their efforts.

The students who drove the telescope from the Victorian Space Science Education (VSSEC) in Melbourne used it to make real observations of the small spinning stars called pulsars.

Scientists who use NASA’s Fermi space telescope to study pulsars work collaboratively with researchers using the Parkes telescope.

They are interested in what the students from Footscray City Secondary College, Braemar College and Strathmore Secondary College will find and have signed up for the Twitter updates.

The session is part of an ongoing program called ‘PULSE@Parkes’ that is giving students around the country the chance to do real science with a large, professional, radio telescope.

The program is an initiative of CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF), which operates Parkes and other radio telescopes in NSW.

Up to 24 students can take part in an observing session.

Some days before the session they receive an introduction to radio astronomy, pulsars, and the nuts and bolts of observing.

During the actual session they talk to an astronomer present at Parkes via videolink and take full control of the telescope.

The students take real data and analyse it to determine, for instance, the distance of the pulsars they observe.

To follow future students on Twitter follow PULSEatParkes.

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