Progress on Suffa Large Radiotelescope Project

The large-scale radio astronomy facility complex (analogous to the GBT at NRAO) is being created not far from Samarkand (Uzbekistan) on Suffa plateau at 2300 m (Trimble,2001). Originally it was designed as a basic part of the Earth-Space VLBI system (Kardashev et al,1995; URL http://www.asc.rssi.ru/suffa/) and contains the radio telescope for 0.8-60 mm band with 70m main reflector, two removable subreflectors; satellite communication station; data receiving and processing system and other necessary infrastructure. The adaptive optics principle will be used for control the surface of the main mirror consisted of 1200 trapezoid panels. The site location provides good seeing conditions for cm-mm range. Averaged annual atmospheric transmission coefficients at zenith were derived as 0.90-0.98 for 3.1 mm and 5.8 mm wavelengths and about 0.60 for 1.36 (Hojaev & Shanin, 1996). The project started as far back as the period of the Soviet Union was stalled since its disintegration. Quite recently the firm decision on completing the project has been endorsed by our Governments, and Russia will invest for these; therefore the project's layouts have been considerably modernizated and updated in order to build up the state-of-art instrument. It should be operational in 2009. Now we are arranging the scientific consortium to further explore the Suffa site more deep and to learn the main 'radio astro climate' parameters by means of a new technology ('radioseeing', radio transparency in different submm, mm and cm bands, PWV , their intercorrelation and correlation with meteoparameters) for the atmosphere modelling at the site and try to forecast the "radio-weather" for reliably planning the scientific schedule of the future telescope. References: Kardashev N.S., Andreyanov V.V., Gvamichava A.S., Likhachev S.F., and Slysh V.I., 1995, , Acta Astronautica, vol.37, p.271 Hojaev A.S., Shanin G.I., 1996, JKAS, v.29 , p.S411 Trimble, V., 2001, A Year of Discovery: Astronomy Highlights of 2000, Sky and Telescope, vol.101, N.2, p.51