ترغب بنشر مسار تعليمي؟ اضغط هنا

An African VLBI network of radio telescopes

277   0   0.0 ( 0 )
 نشر من قبل Michael F. Bietenholz
 تاريخ النشر 2014
  مجال البحث فيزياء
والبحث باللغة English




اسأل ChatGPT حول البحث

The advent of international wideband communication by optical fibre has produced a revolution in communications and the use of the internet. Many African countries are now connected to undersea fibre linking them to other African countries and to other continents. Previously international communication was by microwave links through geostationary satellites. These are becoming redundant in some countries as optical fibre takes over, as this provides 1000 times the bandwidth of the satellite links. In the 1970s and 1980s some two dozen large (30 m diameter class) antennas were built in various African countries to provide the satellite links. Twenty six are currently known in 19 countries. As these antennas become redundant, the possibility exists to convert them for radio astronomy at a cost of roughly one tenth that of a new antenna of similar size. HartRAO, SKA Africa and the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST) have started exploring this possibility with some of the African countries.



قيم البحث

اقرأ أيضاً

The technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) can provide accurate localization and unique physical information about radio transients. However, it is still underutilized due to the inherent difficulties of VLBI data analysis and practica l difficulties of organizing observations on short notice. We present a brief overview of the currently available VLBI arrays and observing strategies used to study long- and short-duration radio transients.
Guided by the recently published science case for the future of European VLBI, EVN2015, a roadmap for the future of the EVN is sketched out in this paper. The various desired technical improvements are being discussed with an emphasis on the role of e-VLBI. With this innovation new scientific capabilities are introduced. In this way the EVN is also positioned as an interesting platform for exercising new techniques and operational models, complementary to other SKA pathfinders. In return, the technology development for the SKA can have a positive impact on the scientific capabilities of VLBI, for example on the development of a next generation correlator, capable to process much larger data-rates. The development of cheap, frequency agile antennas can also be of great importance for VLBI. This adds to the potential for maintaining a Northern hemisphere, global VLBI array in the SKA era.
This paper presents a survey of microwave front-end receivers installed at radio telescopes throughout the World. This unprecedented analysis was conducted as part of a review of front-end developments for Italian radio telescopes, initiated by the I talian National Institute for Astrophysics in 2016. Fifteen international radio telescopes have been selected to be representative of the instrumentation used for radio astronomical observations in the frequency domain from 300 MHz to 116 GHz. A comprehensive description of the existing receivers is presented and their characteristics are compared and discussed. The observing performances of the complete receiving chains are also presented. An overview of on-going developments illustrates and anticipates future trends in front-end projects to meet the most ambitious scientific research goals.
MeerKATHI is the current development name for a radio-interferometric data reduction pipeline, assembled by an international collaboration. We create a publicly available end-to-end continuum- and line imaging pipeline for MeerKAT and other radio tel escopes. We implement advanced techniques that are suitable for producing high-dynamic-range continuum images and spectroscopic data cubes. Using containerization, our pipeline is platform-independent. Furthermore, we are applying a standardized approach for using a number of different of advanced software suites, partly developed within our group. We aim to use distributed computing approaches throughout our pipeline to enable the user to reduce larger data sets like those provided by radio telescopes such as MeerKAT. The pipeline also delivers a set of imaging quality metrics that give the user the opportunity to efficiently assess the data quality.
The results of four recently introduced beamforming schemes for phased array systems are discussed, each of which is capable to provide high sensitivity and accurate polarimetric performance of array-based radio telescopes. Ideally, a radio polarimet er should recover the actual polarization state of the celestial source, and thus compensate for unwanted polarization degradation effects which are intrinsic to the instrument. In this paper, we compare the proposed beamforming schemes through an example of a practical phased array system (APERTIF prototype) and demonstrate that the optimal beamformer, the max-SLNR beamformer, the eigenvector beamformer, and the bi-scalar beamformer are sensitivity equivalent but lead to different polarization state solutions, some of which are sub-optimal.
التعليقات
جاري جلب التعليقات جاري جلب التعليقات
سجل دخول لتتمكن من متابعة معايير البحث التي قمت باختيارها
mircosoft-partner

هل ترغب بارسال اشعارات عن اخر التحديثات في شمرا-اكاديميا