Greg Hellbourg (CASS)

Greg Hellbourg Colloquium: Spatial RFI Mitigation & Radio Astronomy

Marsfield Lecture Theatre

Abstract

Radio-Frequency Interference (RFI) is a serious and challenging issue for radio
astronomy due to increasing spectrum occupancy. Current approaches for miti-
gating interference contributions to astronomical observations mostly consist of
detecting and excising corrupted data in the time and/or frequency domains.
Although this process is easy to implement, the loss of data involved can be
significant.
The development of sensor arrays in the last decades naturally gave rise to new
trends in signal processing, including spatial RFI mitigation. This scheme is
based on the separation between the source-of-interest and the interferer in the
spatial domain. The main advantage of such an approach is, in theory at least,
the ability to recover uncorrupted time-frequency data after processing.
This talk will briefly introduce the underlying concepts of spatial - or multivari-
ate - signal processing, and discuss its applicability to radio astronomy. After
describing the constitution of an adaptive spatial RFI mitigation algorithm, an
example of a real-time implementation will be presented.