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,...
An overview of the last year of commissioning activities for MeerKAT. The focus will be the role of the science teams - commissioning itself, the Science Data Processing (SDP) group, and the Radio Astronomy Research Group (RARG).
I will discuss our approach to problem solving, the toolsets in use, unforseen challenges, and describe some of the trickiest issues we encountered.
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...
