Friday, 3rd February at 2.00pm @ the JAC
Rob Millenaar
ASTRON, The Netherlands
"The Square Kilometre Array Site Spectrum Monitoring"
ABSTRACT:
The international community is anticipating the design, construction
and operation of the Square Kilometre Array telescope for the next
decade. Around the world several institutes are committed to designing
this huge instrument, but equally important is the site where the
telescope (or subsets of the telescope) will be situated. For this
latter issue several aspects need study and subsequent commitments
from the host country and the international community.
One of the
important aspects for the choice of the site is the radio spectrum
environment in which the new, highly sensitive radio telescope will be
deployed and operated. Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a hazard
that cannot be easily ruled out completely on Earth, but it is of high
importance to find a site where the RFI is at a minimum level. For
this purpose each candidate host country has agreed to perform a year
long survey of the radio spectrum at the proposed location of the core
of the SKA. An international independant survey of the spectrum is to
provide the reference, by which all these individual survey results
have to be tied together. For this, ASTRON has set up a project,
called SSSM - SKA Site Spectrum Monitoring, for which portable
equipment were designed and built. During 2005 a team from ASTRON has
visited all the candidate sites and performed sensitive reference
measurements and executed a cross calibration with the host's local
monitoring equipment. This talk gives an overview of the project:
design and constuction of the equipment is dealt with, and (anonymous)
results from the four sites are shown. Also an impression of what the
sites look like is shown.
The Square Kilometer Array
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