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What Can Radio Telescopes Measure?

-- | April 4, 2015

Question: I have some questions about radio astronomy.

If we build a planetary radio telescope, What data can we measure from the received signals other than listening to the noise of S-burst and L-burst in a project like Radio JOVE? For example is the calculation of physical phenomena like distance, Temperature, etc possible?
Can we study distant objects like Saturn with a planetary project? Or Magnetic field of Jupiter and Sun?
What are the parameters a radio telescope is capable of gathering? Does it give us intensity-frequency or intensity-angle or something else?

Thank you very much for your time — Seraj

Answers:

Radio telescopes can make measurements of the same physical characteristics of planetary objects, such as planets, comets, and asteroids, as do other (optical, infrared, etc.) telescopes. The difference is that radio telescopes measure different physical phenomena to derive these physical characteristics.
Yes. Radio observations can, for example, measure the emission from atoms which are spiraling around magnetic field lines in order to measure the strength of those magnetic fields.
Radio telescopes can measure intensity, position, and polarization as a function of frequency and time.

Jeff Mangum

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