I will provide an overview of the Australian SRC Design Study Program. The program funded by the Australian Government and CSIRO brings together the key partners - CSIRO, ICRAR and Pawsey. In the upcoming 3 years the program will focus on assisting several pilot SKA precursor science projects (ASKAP and MWA) with their software, compute and data needs, as well as working on the SRC system...
The SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) will be at the core of the exploitation of SKA data, being the place where the science will be done and hence should constitute a collaborative framework where researchers can share their experiments. At the IAA-CSIC we are leading the Spanish effort to host an SRC. We are developing a prototype with a special focus on addressing the challenge of handling SKA...
Reframing AIP to a realistic and visible program to the SKA council and science community – how can we do this together?
How do we do the above and cohere with other major array developments – ngVLA, DS1000 etc…
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is the largest radio telescope to be built by astronomers. The key factor that promotes the SKA to achieve milestones in science frontier research is the capability of properly processing the SKA data and converting the data to scientific products. SKA Observatory (SKAO) will only produces pre-calibrated data which are not science-ready for publication....
This talk will present the CADC's current activities related to the development of science platform infrastructure, open software and data sharing standards in astronomy (image cutouts, VO services, interactive work sessions, batch processing, data models, user database services, etc.). These activities are directly influenced by and in support of our participation in the CIRADA project and...
The Horizon 2020 AENEAS project was formed to develop a science-driven functional design for a distributed federated European SKA Regional Centre. Here I will present some of the technical assessment work from the AENEAS project sizing the compute and storage requirements for the European SRC. This exercise used a ground-up approach to determine the volume of both primary and secondary data...
India is one of the countries that will potentially host an SKA regional centre . In preparation to hosting a full fledged SRC, we have proposed to develop a prototype SRC during 2019-2023. This prototype will contain sufficient storage and compute to meet the requirements of processing data from the uGMRT, an SKA pathfinder telescope. I will describe ongoing efforts at developing an end to...
AAIR is a project developped for MFAA consortium “Middle Frequency Aperture Array”, part of SKA Advanced Instrumentation Program. AAIR aims the miniaturization and integration inside chips, or ASIC “Application Specific Integrated Circuit”, radiofrequency features including
fast digitization. With AAIR project, cheaper cost is then highlight and power consumption is naturally brought in the...
As a post-doc at the Very Large Array in the late 1970s, and as the Project Scientist of the Expanded Very Large Array (now the Jansky Very Large Array), I was intimately involved the the engineering and science commissioning of both instruments. The commissioning processes for these two projects were notable for their lack of structure and formality. That this apparently uncoordinated,...
Cryogenic low noise amplifiers (LNAs) are in high demand for highly sensitive detection in radio astronomy and quantum technology research and development. This presentation describes the design and testing of an extremely low noise amplifier based on 3-stage GaAs HEMTs and a microwave integrated circuit. Utilizing computer-aided design techniques, lumped passive components were adapted to...
As observed by computer scientists in SKA science data processor (SDP) consortium, the designed capability of scientific data processing is significantly reduced in the current design of SDP by focusing only on high-priority scientific observation tasks, and reducing the number of effective baselines of the antenna. SDP consortium reduced the sustainable requirement of imaging computation for...
HI Intensity Mapping (HIIM) as a probe of cosmological large-scale structures (LSS) is considered promising and has been test with cross-correlation with optical galaxy survey using Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Parkes Telescope. MeerKAT and SKA have the potential to achieve largest and deepest HIIM survey in the near future. However, HIIM is also most challenging due to the bright foreground...
There have been many operational improvements to the MWA in the last year that enhance the scientific capabilities of the telescope and underpin the array's importance as a SKA-Low precursor instrument. This update will give an overview of the array and current science focus.
VLBI will be one of the observing modes of the SKA Observatory. An important effort has been made to incorporate the VLBI capability in the design of the SKA correlators. JUMPING JIVE Project has supported this process assessing the designs during the Critical Design Reviews and helping to refine the technical and operational requirements for the VLBI capability. Moreover, JUMPING JIVE has...
Significant scientific discoveries are currently being driven
by the analysis of large volumes of image data, and the SKA-square
kilometer array telescope is one of them in astronomy. At present, there
are many computation and transmission frameworks supporting such
tasks, but the specific performance of the frameworks for astronomical
science data processing (SDP) remains to be verified. In...
The feed indexer was designed and manufactured in Italy for both dish prototypes installed in China (SKA-P) and South Africa (SKA-MPI). A third prototype was developed and verified at the SAM plants in order to improve their electromechanical performances and to speed the mass production. Tools for rapid-testing and a rotation and elevation control system based on open source real-time...
The report mainly discusses the measurement and calibration methods of large radio telescopes. The topic is related to the antenna's pointing, sub-reflector position and main reflector shape measurement and modeling methods. The SKA-P holography measurement is also disscussed detailly. The methods are adopted on several radio telescopes include CVN , and other 13m telescopes.
Incorporating the SKA as an element in a VLBI array is on the road map - although not until later in the project.
In this talk I will demonstrate that, based on VLBI experiments conducted with the MeerKAT SKA precursor, it might be beneficial to attempt (small scale) VLBI during commissioning instead.
The reason is that VLBI has the unique capability to uncover issues in several aspects of...
