image: Matt Shields, a member of the CABB team, is doing a quality check on a completed CABB signal processing board. view more
Credit: Tim Morison, Patrick Jones Photographic Studio
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.
CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Megan Clark today visited the Australia Telescope Compact Array—a set of six radio dishes— and praised the staff involved in the 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," Dr Clark said.
The 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's like going from dial-up access to the Universe to having broadband," said Mr Graeme Carrad, Assistant Director for Engineering at CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF), which operates the telescope.
The seven year, $12 million upgrade is called the Compact Array Broadband Backend (CABB) project. It has been partly funded by a grant under the Commonwealth Government's Major National Research Facilities program, and CSIRO.
During the upgrade the radio dishes and the receivers that do the initial amplification of the cosmic radio signals have stayed the same, but just about every other piece of equipment the signals pass through has been changed.
Mr Carrad said that these changes have "opened the taps", allowing eighty times more data to flow from the antennas to the rest of the system.
"All this data could be captured, although astronomers may or may not choose to do so," Mr Carrad said.
Thirty-two special processing boards, each with 26 layers and 4000 components, were designed and built by the ATNF for this project.
International demand for this technology has been strong, with CSIRO selling offshoots of the system to five radio observatories around the world.
CSIRO has also used new systems arising from CABB development to improve the performance of its other radio telescopes, the 64m Parkes dish in central-west NSW and the 22m Mopra dish near Coonabarabran, NSW.
"CABB will have a huge impact on the Compact Array's scientific output," said ATNF's Acting Director Dr Lewis Ball.
Increasing the telescope's bandwidth makes the telescope four times more sensitive to faint signals, and able to detect cosmic objects travelling at a wider range of velocities.
"Observers will be able to detect cosmic objects more quickly," Dr Ball said. "They'll also be able to pick up new features in objects that have been studied before."
Crucially, the upgrade also makes the telescope less susceptible to the effects of radio-frequency interference.
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.
The scale and complexity of CABB demonstrate CSIRO's capacity to undertake large projects such as ASKAP.
The greater bandwidth and increased data flow provided by CABB demand new ways to analyse data and calibrate telescope performance.
"What we learn from working with CABB will be important for ASKAP and the SKA," said Dr Ball.
Image available at: http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/mediarelease/mr09-67.html