Herouni mirror radio telescope

I wanted to call this post “Monuments to ambition and ego” :-) I’ll explain why below.

The Herouni telescope is the world’s first radio-optical telescope, ROT-54/2.6. It was created by Soviet radiophysicist Paris Herouni. Construction was completed by 1987. The telescope is located on the slope of Aragats — the highest mountain in Armenia.

It’s about 40 km from Yerevan to the telescope. Easy to visit as a day trip.

At the entrance, the guard asked for 2000 drams per person. I think you could negotiate down to 1000–1500, but we didn’t bother.

I saw many complaints online, including from foreigners, that the guard pockets the money. But from my experience, this is common practice at abandoned sites in Armenia and Georgia.

Arrived:

When you stand at the edge of the dish, the telescope doesn’t fit into the frame.

Switching to a wider lens. A monastery is visible in the background.

In clear weather, Ararat is visible behind the monastery from here. But that day it was hazy.

Switching to the widest lens.

Two videos to get a sense of scale.

Shadows waving hands:

A person walking:

The telescope has a fixed radio mirror 54 meters in diameter and a 25-meter pendulum. Initially, Herouni planned a telescope of 100 or even 200 meters, but funding wasn’t approved.

While researching online, I found conflicting opinions on whether the telescope was fully operational and whether any discoveries were made. Here are some quotes:

🔔 The village of Orgov is located on the other side of the gorge from the village of Byurakan. [...] According to the plan, Orgov was supposed to be resettled to avoid building a road through the gorge to a dead-end village, but Herouni, without waiting for permission, mobilized his subordinates and local residents. As a result, a road through the gorge was built, construction materials were delivered, and construction began.

🔔 The institute was not originally supposed to build any telescope; it was meant to produce reference antennas and carry out dry technical measurements and calibrations. But Herouni had other plans — under the guise of one such reference antenna, he intended to build the world’s first dual-band telescope.

🔔 The largest reference antenna according to state standards was a 32-meter dish, and according to Herouni’s calculations, this was not enough for a project of his scale. So, without much approval, he ordered the construction of a 54-meter metal dish in a karst sinkhole that had been enlarged using explosives, dedicating all available production capacity to the new project.

🔔 [...] the key feature — dual-band capability (which, by the way, Moscow didn’t even know about) — required somehow fitting in a full optical telescope as well.

🔔 For this, a special pendulum-like structure was designed, with a four-ton optical telescope mirror (2.6 meters in diameter) mounted at the top. This made the original structural calculations essentially useless [...] In particular, the straight supports were replaced with curved ones, leading to unwanted vibrations and making the telescope incapable of performing its main function — smoothly and continuously tracking a distant point in the sky, because it was literally shaking.

Here’s why I included them.

It stands out how many actions were taken against constraints. There’s a strong conflict with the reality of that time. Such resistance increases the chance of failure.

Of course, many breakthrough projects were born by overcoming resistance from established norms. But it’s important to understand what kind of resistance is being overcome. I’d distinguish two types of “against”:

Healthy — against inertia, fear, rigid regulations, and bureaucratic stagnation. Without this, nothing new often appears at all.

Unhealthy — against calculations, physics, team capacity, operational logic, and future maintenance. This path often leads to something that “never really works.”

As I studied the history of the Herouni telescope, I increasingly felt that this was a case of “destructive against.” That’s largely why it ended up as a monument to ambition.

Of course, not everything created against the odds is doomed to fail. But the more unresolved resistance there is in a project, process, or relationship, the higher the chance the result will be non-viable — and eventually rejected by reality.

I noticed that very little foliage had accumulated in the telescope dish:

I doubt the dish has been cleaned in decades. Interesting why more leaves didn’t gather.

Patterns:

The dish consists of 3600 panels made of an aluminum-based alloy with magnesium, copper, and manganese. The panels were hand-polished to an accuracy of 70 microns. Good for the 1980s — not great by today’s standards.

Next to the dish is the control room:

Control panels are still preserved inside:

Testing equipment:

Panel fragments:

Traces of modernization (1995–2010):

Clocks on the panels:

I got interested in what sidereal time is. It turns out it’s measured based on Earth’s rotation relative to distant stars, not the Sun. A sidereal day lasts 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds. That means sidereal clocks constantly lag behind standard time.

Watches on the wall:

I wanted to take the clock but didn’t go through with it. On one hand, it will be removed sooner or later anyway. On the other — something stops me from taking part in that.

There are more control panels in ather rooms

used for managing the territory.

Surprisingly, the ceiling is well preserved:

The parquet survived too, though not as well:

Arches are common in Armenian architecture. This building is no exception.

Previously, you could go down

and enter the telescope dish:

But now the entrance is welded shut with a grid.

Remains of a telescope model have been preserved in the control room:

The smaller telescope in the model is the Herouni telescope — the one we’re currently at. They planned to build an even larger one nearby, but those plans were never realized.

A drafting table from FRG:

Interesting that the country where the table was made (FRG) and the country that bought it (USSR) no longer exist.

At some point, an art festival was held in this building:

On the back side of the building, an aluminum entrance group has been preserved:

There is a sundial outside. It still works!

Nearby is a hangar where antennas were made.

We tried to get inside the hangar, but a man came out and said: “Why are you breaking the door!”

Testing one of the mirror antennas:

Two residential buildings are located next to the control room. One of them is in good condition.

We found a room with fragments of documents.

A fragment from “The Good Soldier Švejk”:

Hmm, perhaps this is a test page of the system:

A form for autobiography:

A story about a hotel in Italy:

If you convert 1982 lira to late-2025 dollars, a double room with breakfast would cost around $180.

After the collapse of the USSR, record-keeping deteriorated:

Near the telescope there is a solar energy concentrator. It was intended as an alternative to oil-based energy.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Herouni found investors from the UK. They wanted to build the installation there, but he managed to negotiate building it in Armenia.

During construction, Herouni discovered that patent and authorship rights were not secured for him in the contract. The parties failed to agree, and construction was halted.

If this is indeed how it happened, it suggests a conflict between personal ego and a project that deserved to exist.

In this case, negotiations seem to have failed, and Herouni chose not to continue. Although theoretically, he could have kept negotiating and improving terms.

Even without securing the patent, the project could still have been realized. Perhaps it would have earned more. More importantly, the technology would have had a chance to live. Humanity would have taken another step forward.

Or maybe Herouni simply lost faith in the project 🤔 We don’t see solar concentrators as a widespread solution today. Maybe the calculations weren’t perfect either.

In the residential building, unattached mirrors still remain. People write on them when they visited.