Important Information
The ATCA Science Day, ATUC Open Session and Postgraduate Student Symposium will be in person at the Lecture Theatre at CSIRO, Marsfield (Sydney), NSW. Online attendees will be able to join via Teams.
- To participate in the Science Day and ATUC Open Session, please register, in advance. The registration deadline is 17:00 AWST on 28 March 2025. Registration information for the Postgraduate Student Symposium will be sent out shortly.
- In order to facilitate Q&A sessions during the meeting, please indicate your desire to ask a question by posting a message in the Teams chat, or use the ‘raise hand’ feature. The session chair will invite you to ask your question in due course.
- If you, as a user (or potential user) of the ATNF, are aware of any issues that need to be raised at the next ATUC meeting, or would like to offer feedback on ATNF activities and facilities, you can do so via the ATUC Community Submission Form or by contacting any member of ATUC.
Agenda
8 April – ATCA Science Day: Exploring new opportunities and highlighting ATCA’s unique capabilities in the SKA era
(10:00 – 17:00 AEST / 09:00 – 15:00 AWST)
The Australia Telescope Compact Array has been a cornerstone of the Australian radio astronomy landscape for close to 40 years. The BIGCAT upgrade, currently underway, will replace the entire backend of the telescope, doubling the instantaneous bandwidth while also making ATCA more flexible, adaptable and responsive.
In order for the ATNF to maintain its suite of radio facilities offered to the community, ATCA likely needs to transition to a self-sustaining funding model over the next few years. The focus of this science day is to bring us together to identify additional funding avenues, explore new opportunities for collaborations, and highlight the unique capabilities of ATCA required by the community.
| All times in AEST | ||
| 10:00 – 10:30 | S&A Director’s Morning Tea (in-person only) | |
| Intro (Chair: Elizabeth Mahony) | ||
| 11:00 – 11:10 | Welcome | Douglas Bock |
| 11:10 – 11:20 | Path forward for the ATCA | Cath Trott |
| 11:20 – 11:30 | ATCA+BIGCAT: strengths & capabilities | Jamie Stevens |
| Session 1 (Chair: Kovi Rose) | ||
| 11:30 – 11:40 | Rapid-response triggering on transients with ATCA | Gemma Anderson |
| 11:40 – 11:50 | Radio and gamma-ray synergies with the ATCA and the forthcoming CTA Observatory | Gavin Rowell |
| 11:50 – 12:00 | The ATCA from milliseconds to minutes: current and future time-domain and pulsar capabilities | Andrew Zic |
| 12:00 – 12:10 | Multi-messenger transients with the ATCA | Dougal Dobie |
| 12:10 – 12:20 | LSST+ATCA | Anais Moller |
| 12:20 – 12:30 | Unveiling the Transient Universe: ATCA’s Unique Capabilities for Radio Follow-up in the SKA Era | Tao An/Yuanqi Li |
| 12:30 – 12:40 | A southern-hemisphere radio transients facility? | James Miller-Jones |
| 12:40 – 12:45 | Catch up time/discussion/Q&A | |
| 12:45 – 13:30 | Lunch East Coast / Break West Coast | |
| Session 2 (Chair: Josh Pritchard) | ||
| 13:30 – 13:50 | Discussion: Bringing the transient community together | Tara Murphy |
| 13:50 – 14:00 | ATCA’s role in understanding sub-arcsecond source populations | Rajan Chhetri / Emily Kerrison |
| 14:00 – 14:10 | The ongoing role of ATCA in studies of scattering as a probe of small-scale ionised structures in the interstellar medium. | Hayley Bignall |
| 14:10 – 14:20 | Peering deep into star clusters with ATCA | Arash Bahramian |
| 14:20 – 14:30 | VLBI transients science with ATCA | Kelly Gourdji |
| 14:30 – 14:40 | Using BIGCAT for multiple antenna streams: widefield VLBI and other applications | Jordan Collier |
| 14:40 – 14:50 | How ATCA+BIGCAT can enhance SKA’s science impact | George Heald |
| 14:50 – 15:00 | Spectral line science with ATCA | Ivy Wong / Max Voronkov |
| 15:00 – 15:40 | Break East Coast / Lunch West Coast | |
| Session 3 (Chair: Elizabeth Mahony) | ||
| 15:40 – 15:50 | Radio stars on long timescales: the power of ATCA monitoring campaigns | Sanne Bloot |
| 15:50 – 16:10 | Discussion: Training and Automation | Kovi Rose |
| 16:10 – 16:20 | SSA@ATCA & friends | Doug Hayman |
| 16:20 – 16:30 | ATCA for Space Domain Awareness: Aspirations vs. Reality – Addressing the Technical Gaps. | Ryan Nosrati (QUASAR) |
| 16:30 – 16:40 | Commercially reinventing radio astronomy infrastructure – precedents and potential | James Webb (Platypus R&D) |
| 16:40 – 17:00 | Discussion: Wrap up and next steps | Cath Trott |
9 April – ATUC Closed session: 10:00-10:45 AEST (08:00-08:45 AWST)
9 April – ATUC Open session
11:00-16:40 AEST (09:00-14:40 AWST)
| All times in AEST | Session 1 – High level overview Chair: Andrew Zic | |
| 11:00 – 11:10 | ATUC Chair’s Welcome | Stas Shabala |
| 11:10 – 11:40 | ATNF Director’s Update | Douglas Bock |
| 11:40 – 11:50 | Verbal response to ATUC’s recommendations | George Hobbs |
| 11:50 – 12:00 | Catch up time/discussion/Q&A | |
| | ||
| Session 2 – ATNF Science Chair: Kelly Gourdji | ||
| 12:00 – 12:10 | High level view of ATNF Science into the future | Cath Trott |
| 12:10 – 12:20 | The graduate student program | Rob Hollow |
| 12:20 – 12:30 | Status of the ASKAP SSPs and forecasting survey rates | Vanessa Moss |
| 12:30 – 12:35 | The LOTRUN project | Andrew Zic |
| 12:35 – 12:40 | Using all of the wideband receiver | Gosia Curylo |
| 12:40 – 12:45 | Catch up time/discussion/Q&A | |
| 12:45 – 13:30 | Lunch East Coast / Break West Coast | |
| | ||
| Session 3 – Upcoming instrumentation Chair: Wenhua Ling | ||
| 13:30 – 13:40 | New methods for management of ATNF projects | Mark Bowen |
| 13:40 – 13:50 | Status of the BIGCAT project | Chris Phillips |
| 13:50 – 14:00 | Status of the CryoPAF project | Simon Johnston |
| | ||
| Session 4 – Software, computing, data and pipelines Chair: Dongjin Kim | ||
| 14:00 – 14:10 | ASKAP Key Capabilities Project | Aidan Hotan |
| 14:10 – 14:20 | Data and data archiving | Minh Huynh |
| 14:20 – 14:45 | Pipelines: – New features in ASKAPsoft – Flint and ASKAPsoft comparison – ATCA pipeline ideas – Parkes pipeline ideas – Q&A | Matthew Whiting Tim Galvin Josh Pritchard Lawrence Toomey |
| 14:45 – 15:30 | Break East Coast / Lunch West Coast | |
| | ||
| Session 5 – From now, to the future Chair: Lawrence Toomey | ||
| 15:30 – 16:00 | 6 month forecast of our facilities: – Science update for all observatories – Operations update for all observatories – Q & A | George Hobbs Daleen Koch |
| 16:00 – 16:35 | The next generation of facilities and systems: – ATNF of the Future – Status of the LAMBDA project – ASKAP PAF upgrade – The Parkes Ultrawide-band mid and high upgrades – Science will all-sky monitors – Q&A | Keith Bannister Tessa Vernstrom Aidan Hotan Shi Dai Josh Pritchard |
| 16:35 – 16:40 | Wrap up |
10 April – ATUC Closed session
11 April – 2025 Postgraduate Student Symposium
(10:55-17:20 AEST / 08:55-15:20 AWST)
| All times in AEST | Session 1 – Chair: Saurav Mishra | |
| 10:55 – 11:00 | Welcome & Housekeeping | Rob Hollow |
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Tracing Interactions Between HII Regions and Their Parent Molecular Clouds | Beth Cappellazzo |
| 11:15 – 11:30 | Corkscrew Radio Jets as Probes of Jet-ICM Interactions and Cluster Magnetic Fields | Sarah Bradbury |
| 11:30 – 11:45 | Trying to study Tiny scale atomic structures in ISM with New Mode in Parkes | Aditi Kaushik |
| 11:45 – 12:00 | Mitigating RFI | Tommy Marshman |
| 12:00 – 12:15 | Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation with Phased Array Feeds | Justin Smallwood |
| 12:15 – 13:00 | Lunch East Coast / Break West Coast | |
| Session 2 – Chair: Sarah Bradbury | ||
| 13:00 – 13:15 | Quantum Machine Learning for Fast Radio Burst Discoveries | Agastya Kapur |
| 13:15 – 13:30 | Exploring Nearby Dwarfs with Hi-KIDS: Stellar Populations, Gas Dynamics, and Chemical Enrichment | Xuanyi Lyu |
| 13:30 – 13:45 | Exploring diffuse radio emission in galaxy groups using EMU survey data | Sai Sanjay Wagh |
| 13:45 – 14:00 | Reflections from the Chaos | Angie Waszewski |
| 14:00 – 14:15 | Scintillation of spacecraft radio signals for studying space weathe | Jasper Edwards |
| 14:15 – 14:30 | Testing general relativity with cosmic magnification | Albany Asher |
| 14:30 – 15:15 | Break East Coast / Lunch West Coast | |
| Session 3 – Chair: Sai Sanjay Wagh & Rami Mandow | ||
| 15:15 – 15:30 | The interstellar lifecycle: Dense gas in the Milky Way | Bradley Johnson |
| 15:30 – 15:45 | caCOpOHny: The Discordant Saga of CO and OH Tracers | Mradumay Sadh |
| 15:45 – 16:00 | When a Pulsar’s Magnetosphere Breaks | Rami Mandow |
| 16:00 – 16:15 | Refining Pulsar Timing and Noise Models for Robust GW Detection | Saurav Mishra |
| 16:15 – 16:30 | Choosing the right noise models in nanohertz gravitational-wave parameter estimation | Valentina Di Marco |
| 16:30 – 16:45 | Using CSIRO’s Mopra 22m Dish for Cislunar Space Situational Awareness | Tim Bateman |
| 16:45 – 17:15 | S&A Student Comms Discussion | |
| 17:15 – 17:20 | Closing | Rob Hollow |