Remote access aids ASKAP commissioning activity

A ground view of three ASKAP antennas against a starry sky.

1 May 2013

Further progress is being made towards optimising remote accessibility of ASKAP from CSIRO's Astronomy and Space Science headquarters in Sydney.

This shift towards use of the antennas and their installed systems as a remote instrument is allowing for ongoing commissioning activities at the remote Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) to be far more effectively carried out.

The Digital System team has been busy developing the ASKAP hardware correlator, which will soon be on its way to the MRO for remote development and testing. The installation of the hardware correlator is the next vital step in the development and commissioning of the telescope. Once online, the correlator is expected to offer the full 304 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth at 18 kHz resolution.

With the hardware correlator in place, testing of the ASKAP Science Processing Pipeline can also commence, allowing the commissioning team to start early evaluation of other high-level functionality. One of the important early outcomes of the hardware correlator delivery will be the further refinement of beamforming algorithms for calibration of the ASKAP receiver systems, enabled by the significant increase in processing bandwidth (and hence sensitivity).

As highlighted previously, test runs with the ASKAP antennas have already produced initial images using the custom-made software correlator to process the raw data captured directly from the beamformer. Though the initial results have been highly valuable in the commissioning process, the interim data capture/software correlator system is limited to 16 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth and therefore unable to offer the benefits of using a hardware correlator.

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