Showcasing RRI
An overview of the Square Kilometre Array radio interferometer telescope activities at RRI.
Speaker: Prabu T (Raman Research Institute)
The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is a major radio interferometer telescope that is being built by an international collaboration. The first phase of the telescope will have two arrays, SKA1-mid: a mid-frequency dish array to be constructed in South Africa and SKA1-low: a low-frequency aperture array to be constructed in Western Australia. A significant design challenge for the SKA1-Low telescope comes from the enormous size of the low-frequency aperture array. The telescope array is formed out of 131,072 wide-band antennas optimally positioned in groups of 256 to create 512 stations across a wide area of about 40 km in radius. The antennas are dual polarized, covering a 1:7 frequency range (50 – 350 MHz). Establishing these requirements for an antenna design is challenging as it is an optimization across several parameters. This talk will provide the necessary background and details of our activities at RRI linked to the SKA science projects: Pulsar Search/Timing and beamforming.