Within the framework of the project “Developing Advanced Lofar Technologies for Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainable Development” (project No. 692257 – BALTICS), two VIRAC employees from June 25 to September 17 participated in the three-month internship project “Interferometer Design and Construction”, run by University of Manchester.

The practice was held at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, which is part of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. The purpose of the practice was to work on the Manchester University Student Telescope (MUST) in the observatory, to discover its architecture, checking its individual nodes and overall performance, improving existing design and optimizing the technical solutions used.

MUST is a phased array telescope or an interferometer that serves as a test bench for students to master the interferometer operating principles in a simplified manner. MUST is intended to be used as a student training tool for indirect measurements of solar diameter, pulsar observations and the search for fast radio bursts.

In addition to working with MUST, during the last week of practice, VIRAC staff also participated in the LOFAR (Low-Frequency Array) seminar organized by the University of Manchester at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy ASTRON in the Netherlands, where data processing and radio frequency source modeling problems were addressed.

During the practice, all planned tasks were implemented and now the first high-quality Solar Observations data have already been obtained by MUST. MUST will later be used as a training tool for students at the University of Manchester to prepare new researchers for work with LOFAR, EVN (The European VLBI Network), SKA (Square Kilometre Array), and ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array).

The acquired knowledge and competence when working on the development of MUST allows to understand the simplified interferometer structure and its operating principles. No less important is that the competency acquired allows the creation of an analogue or similar student telescope in Irbene.