ASKAP Antenna Passes Factory Testing
12 October 2009
Australia Telescope National Facility staff travelled to China at the end of September to undertake factory acceptance testing of the first Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) 12-metre antenna.
It was only in November 2008, after an international tendering process, that CSIRO awarded the contract for construction of ASKAP’s antennas to Chinese company CETC54.
During their busy seven-day visit to CETC54’s test range in Shijiazhuang, CSIRO’s ASKAP team worked through the antenna’s factory acceptance tests, which were all successfully completed. Over the next few months the antenna will be disassembled, painted and transported to Western Australia where construction will commence at the end of 2009. All 36 antennas, and their technical systems, will be completed in 2013.
Watch the videohref> of ASKAP Antenna 1 factory acceptance testing in China [4MB .wmv file, opens with Windows Media Player].
ASKAP is a next-generation telescope being developed and built by the CSIRO. It will allow astronomers to answer questions about cosmic magnetism, and the evolution and formation of galaxies, and to assist in the discovery of pulsars and possibly gravitational waves. To be located in the Mid West region of Western Australia, ASKAP will be made up of 36 identical 12-metre antennas that will all work together as one instrument.
The design of ASKAP is unique among radio telescopes. Its antennas feature three-axis movement, while all other radio telescopes in the world move along just two axes. ASKAP will also use ‘phased array feeds’ rather than ‘single pixel feeds’ to detect and amplify faint radio waves, a development being pioneered by CSIRO in conjunction with colleagues in the Netherlands, Canada, United Kingdom and Germany. These attributes mean that the telescope will be able to survey large areas of sky with unprecedented sensitivity.
Once built, ASKAP will operate as part of CSIRO’s radio-astronomy facility for use by Australian and international scientists.
As well as being a world-leading telescope in its own right, ASKAP will be an important test-bed for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a future international radio telescope that will be the world’s largest and most sensitive.
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