A scientist standing in front of a wideband analogue correlator for the Australia Telescope.

Electronics engineer Brett Hiscock with a wideband analogue correlator built for the Australia Telescope Compact Array.

Signal processing: turning ‘space whispers’ into information

CSIRO builds a variety of signal-processing systems, both digital and analogue, for its own telescopes and others around the world.

  • 6 August 2007 | Updated 5 July 2012

CSIRO’s Astronomy and Space Science Division designs and builds high-speed signal-processing systems, both digital and analogue, for radio telescopes.

These systems transform the signal output from the telescope's receivers into data in a form that astronomers can use. They are an essential, and complex, part of a radio telescope.

Radio signals from cosmic objects have very wide bandwidth and are generally ‘noise-like’ rather than repetitive. This makes them very different from the telecommunications signals that most off-the-shelf signal-processing systems are designed to handle. Accordingly, radio telescopes need purpose-built signal processors.

Signal processors are also built to achieve specific science goals.

Examples of such systems are:

  • digital and analogue correlators for interferometers (sets of radio telescopes that work together), such as CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array
  • processors for extremely rapid sampling (for instance, of pulsar signals)
  • spectrometers, which show how signal strength varies with frequency.

CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science’s specific areas of expertise in this field are:

  • the construction of high-speed wideband sampling circuits and digital signal processors, especially as applied to spectrometry
  • the computer control of signal processors, particularly correlators
  • the production of highly stable frequency-reference systems for interferometers
  • data transfer, especially analogue transfer of very-wide-band signals over fibre optics.

How CSIRO uses the capability

CSIRO builds signal-processing systems that gives its telescopes rare versatility

CSIRO builds signal-processing systems for its own radio telescopes (collectively known as the Australia Telescope):

  • the six 22-metre antennas of the Australia Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri, NSW
  • the 64-metre Parkes radio telescope near Parkes, NSW
  • the 22-metre Mopra telescope near Coonabarabran, NSW.

Who else is involved

CSIRO builds signal-processing systems for telescopes of other institutions. Examples are:

  • digital data acquisition systems for the University of Tasmania’s telescopes near Hobart, Tasmania, and Ceduna, South Australia, and for the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex at Tidbinbilla in the Australian Capital Territory
  • correlators for Ceduna and Tidbinbilla, for the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory in South Africa, and for the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory
  • correlator-control software for Taiwan’s AMiBA telescope
  • a spectrometer for the Onsala Space Observatory, now used on the APEX telescope.

Learn about the work CSIRO does in Astronomy & Space Technologies.