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1 Location - The telescope is located on a hilltop in a nature reserve in the small town of

Sutherland, South Africa. With a car, one could easily visit the location.

1 History: The S.A.L.T. telescope is based on the Hobby-Eberly telescope at the McDonald
Observatory in Texas. The new concept was to have a telescope that is built at a fixed angle, but
with the ability to spin around (the resulting telescope is therefore only partly movable). The
Hobby-Eberly telescope was modified in specific ways to make the sky more observable – and
this was now available through the resulting SALT telescope. Because only 70% of the sky is
observable, the SALT telescope uses Earth’s rotation to help observe particular parts of the sky
the observer wants to. In other words, the SALT telescope works with Earth’s rotation, rather than
against it.

2 : The South African Large Telescope is a 9.2-meter telescope. It is a reflector telescope, which
is an optical telescope that uses a single or combination of curved mirrors that reflect light and
form an image. It is the largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere (it weighs 82 tons!)
and it enables imaging, spectroscopic, and polarimetric analysis of the radiation from
astronomical objects out of reach of northern hemisphere telescopes. The telescope probes
quasars and enables scientists to view stars and galaxies a billion times too faint to be seen by
the naked eye.

3. Goals – The SALT telescope, due to its technology, allows extremely precise observation,
even of objects very far away. Because of this, the main goal of this mission is to further conduct
asteroid studies, binary star studies, and studies of the bird galaxy, because these studies all
require specific observation by a very accurate telescope.

4:

SALT astronomers in Poland have recently used SALT to study a sample of near-Earth Very
Small Asteroids (VSAs) which are extremely faint, and difficult to observe. VSAs are essentially
the building blocks of larger asteroids, and, therefore, are extremely helpful to study. SALT
imaging observations were conducted and the resulting light curves (plots showing the asteroid
brightness versus time) were used to calculate how fast the asteroids rotate on their own axis. In
total, SALT observations have led to research on 26 very small asteroids in near-Earth orbits.

The SALT has also conducted studies on binary stars – stars orbiting in pairs around each other
and around a common area of mass. The two stars orbit each other once every few hours but
they are so close together that it is hard to distinguish them. However, the SALT telescope allows
more specific study and observation of these two stars and their flares. Currently, scientists are
trying to uncover specific information about “X-ray binaries,” which are stars that emit their light in
X-rays. However, the studies are not yet conclusive.

Most successful, however, are the studies SALT has concluded on the “Bird Galaxy.” The power
of SALT has led astronomers to discover and understand the result of a three-galaxy collision 650
million light years away. Before SALT observations, scientists believed the object was a single
“luminous infrared galaxy.” Upon closer inspection, however, it was revealed to be interacting
triplet of galaxies, radiating infra-red wavelengths. Scientists at SALT then analyzed light from the
'Bird' using a spectrograph, making it possible to study the bodily conditions and motions of the
three colliding galaxies in detail.

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