ASKAP hardware on the road to the MRO
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1 August 2013
Following the successful hardware correlator tests at first the Sydney headquarters of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, and then out at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) a few days later, the remaining pieces of ASKAP BETA hardware and firmware systems are now on the road to Western Australia.
Already, integration tests performed onsite at the MRO with the ASKAP hardware correlator resulted in successful initial phase closure results with the ASKAP Mk I phased array feed receivers (or PAFs) already installed on Antennas 1, 3 and 6.
Once the next three PAF receivers arrive at the MRO, the team will work on installation, integration and commissioning of the hardware and firmware systems. The six âMk 1â ASKAP PAFs, along with the digital systems, hardware correlator and beamformer, will form the Boolardy Engineering Test Array, or BETA, a test array to be used by the Commissioning teams to prepare for the full fit-out of the 36 antenna ASKAP telescope.
The immediate challenge for BETA commissioning will now be to perform phase closure tests on the six ASKAP antennas installed with the first generation PAFs â a significant increase in complexity compared to previous commissioning tests, due to the increased signals to be correlated using the six PAFs. Following this will be the development of the imaging process and the use of BETA to further our understanding of how to do astronomy with Phased Array Feeds.
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