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Issue 52 | May 2009
A major upgrade of CSIRO's radio telescope near Narrabri in NSW, which will turn the instrument's data stream into a torrent, is almost completed.
Chief Executive, Megan Clark visited the Australia Telescope Compact Array – a set of six radio dishes – on Tuesday 21 April and praised the staff involved in the Compact Array Broadband Backend (CABB) project.
'Not only will our astronomers get their information from the sky a lot faster, but these efforts will lead to the next generation of signal processing', Megan said.
Megan went to the Narrabri observatory, and its sister observatory near Parkes, as part of her program of visits to become acquainted with all CSIRO sites.
The $12 million upgrade makes the Compact Array's bandwidth – the 'chunk' of radio spectrum it can handle at any one time – sixteen times greater, boosting it from 128 MHz to 2 GHz. It has been partly funded by a grant under the Commonwealth Government's Major National Research Facilities program, and CSIRO.
Thirty-two special processing boards, each with 26 layers and 4000 components, were designed and built by the Australian Telescope National Facility for this project.
CSIRO has sold offshoots of the system to five radio observatories around the world, and used new systems arising from CABB development to improve the performance of its other radio telescopes – the 64 metre Parkes dish and the 22 metre Mopra dish.
The CABB project feeds into the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), a telescope being developed by CSIRO and partners as a precursor to the international plans to build the $3 billion next-generation radio telescope called the Square Kilometre Array or SKA. The CABB signal processing board design is being used as a prototype for the signal processing boards for ASKAP.
L-R: Dr Warwick Wilson, Project Leader for the CABB project; Megan Clark, Chief Executive Megan Clark; and Dr Lewis Ball, Acting Director ATNF, with a CABB signal processing board in front of two antennas of the Australia Telescope Compact Array.
Photo by Paul Mathews Photographics
