From: <stingay_at_email.protected>
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:34:35 +1100

Dear All,

Following on from the MIRANdA (formerly known as the xNTD, MIRA etc
etc) science meeting last week, Simon Johnston is putting together a
revised science case for MIRANdA. He has asked me to lead the
write-up of the science case for VLBI using MIRANdA. I'd like to ask
for some contributions from you folks, perhaps half a page of text on
any areas of VLBI science for which you think MIRANdA would be useful.
 I was hoping to finger a few people as follows:

L-band masers: Phillips/Ellingsen
IDV and AGN: Lovell
Wide-field VLBI: Lenc
Pulsar parallax: Deller/Dodson
Transients: Tingay
Space VLBI: Edwards

Please let me know if you are able to do this. If anyone else has
something else to contribute, please feel free. I'll need text by
about April 10th.

To help give you some idea of the uv coverages, beam, and imaging
sensitivities possible using MIRANdA for VLBI, Adam has added MIRANdA
to his online sensitivity calculator. It is located for the moment
at:

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~adeller/software/lba

Additional relevant information is that MIRANdA will likely be 30
antennas of 12 m diameter. Used as a phased array they should give a
Tsys of approximately 50 Jy at L-band (these numbers are incorporated
into the sensitivity calculator). The maximum baseline for MIRANdA
will be approximately 8 km. The maximum bandwidth will be 300 MHz.
Multi-beaming may be possible for VLBI observations, to increase the
FoV beyond a single phased array beam.

As a note, Adam has also added the 3 Australian NCRIS geoscience 12 m
antennas to the calculator, as well as the 4th geoscience 12 m antenna
of AUT. So, you can start looking at how the LBA uv coverage will
improve with the addition of these antennas. It is a substantial
improvement!

Thanks and Cheers, Steven

P.S. Just a reminder to let me know if you are able to make our next
operations meeting at Swinburne on April 26 and 27.

-- 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Assoc. Prof. Steven Tingay
Swinburne SKA Project Leader
Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology
Mail H39
P.O. Box 218
Hawthorn, Vic 3122
Australia
Ph     +61 (0)3 9214 8758
Fax    +61 (0)3 9214 8797
Email  stingay_at_astro.<!--nospam-->swin.edu.au
          s.tingay_at_optusnet.<!--nospam-->com.au
          Steven.Tingay_at_gmail.<!--nospam-->com

Received on 2007-03-23 09:35:10