Radio telescopes stamp their mark across the world

Postage stamps generally feature an illustration of persons, events, institutions, or natural realities that symbolise a nation’s traditions, values, and history. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that radio telescopes, as the iconic cutting-edge engineering structures that they are, have long featured on postage stamps around the globe.

In honour of World Post Day on 9 October, we therefore took a little tour of this subgenre of philately (the study and collection of stamps) featuring many SKA pathfinder and precursor telescopes, from Cold War era stamps featuring the Lovell Telescope, to current stamps, like the one marking the inauguration of FAST, the World’s largest single dish radio telescope.

2016 Dutch stamp featuring ASKAP and an SKA-Low station, part of a set celebrating the 400th anniversary of Dutch explorer Dirk Hartog first setting foot in Australia.

Germany’s Effelsberg 100m Radio Telescope celebrated its 50th birthday in 2021, and marked it by supporting NASA’s Perseverance spacecraft landing on Mars, picking up radio signals broadcast during the tricky descent.

The large radio telescope at Nançay in France had only just been built when this stamp featuring a barred spiral galaxy was released in 1963. The telescope was inaugurated by President Charles De Gaulle two years later.

A 1965 stamp from Sharjah (now in the United Arab Emirates) depicts the 76m Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in the UK. The city was a British Protectorate at the time.

The LOFAR telescope’s core is in the Netherlands with its stations spread across Europe, as shown on this 2009 Dutch stamp.

This 2019 Australian stamp commemorates Parkes radio telescope’s role in the 1969 Moon landings, when it helped to deliver those iconic TV images to the world.

A 1982 stamp featuring India’s 530m-long Ooty Radio Telescope, a groundbreaking facility which led to the development of the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT). Last year we published an obituary about their architect and the father of Indian radio astronomy, Prof. Govind Swarup.

2017 Chinese stamp featuring the Five-hundredmetre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), inaugurated the previous year, complete with pulsars and magnetic field lines.

The Very Large Array (VLA) in the USA. This stamp issued in 2000 is part of a set featuring telescopes that probe deep space.

Credit: US Postal Service

by Mathieu Isidro (SKAO)