VIRAC
The Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre (VIRAC) operates Latvia's radio astronomy and satellite-tracking infrastructure at Irbene, about 30 kilometers from Ventspils on the Baltic coast. The site was built in 1974 by the Soviet military as a signals-intelligence and satellite-communications facility known as Zvezdochka ("Little Star"); after Soviet forces withdrew in 1994 the facility was taken over by the Latvian Academy of Sciences, and it became an independent organization on 24 April 1996 under its current name. VIRAC operates two large parabolic antennas repurposed from the Soviet facility: the RT-32, a 32-metre dish on a 25-metre tower that underwent a major EU- and Latvian-government-funded restoration beginning in 2014, and the smaller RT-16, a 16-metre dish. Since October 2019 the Irbene site has also hosted a LOFAR low-frequency radio astronomy station, part of the pan-European LOFAR network. VIRAC's instruments are used for very-long-baseline interferometry and centimetre-wavelength radio astronomy, for tracking and receiving signals from deep-space and lunar missions through specialized receiving systems, and, more recently, for applying artificial-intelligence methods to astronomical data analysis. The centre now operates as part of Ventspils University of Applied Sciences' Engineering Sciences Institute and is funded through Latvian government and EU research grants. It is Latvia's only large ground-based space-tracking and radio-astronomy facility and the country's principal point of participation in international deep-space support networks.