Open Access
5 January 2022 Characterization of the SKA1-Low prototype station Aperture Array Verification System 2
Giulia Macario, Giuseppe Pupillo, Gianni Bernardi, Pietro Bolli, Paola Di Ninni, Giovanni Comoretto, Andrea Mattana, Jader Monari, Federico Perini, Marco Schiaffino, Marcin Sokolowski, Randall Wayth, Jess Broderick, Mark Waterson, Maria Grazia Labate, Riccardo Chiello, Alessio Magro, Tom Booler, Andrew McPhail, Dave Minchin, Raunaq Bhushan
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

The low frequency component of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA1-Low) will be an aperture phased array located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) site in Western Australia. It will be composed of 512 stations, each consisting of 256 log-periodic dual-polarized antennas, and will operate in the low frequency range (50 to 350 MHz) of the SKA bandwidth. The Aperture Array Verification System 2 (AAVS2), operational since late 2019, is the last full-size engineering prototype station deployed at the MRO site before the start of the SKA1-Low construction phase. The aim of this paper is to characterize the station performance through commissioning observations at six different frequencies (55, 70, 110, 160, 230, and 320 MHz) collected during its first year of activities. We describe the calibration procedure, present the resulting all-sky images and their analysis, and discuss the station calibratability and system stability. Using the difference imaging method, we also derive estimates of the SKA1-Low sensitivity for the same frequencies and compare them with those obtained through electromagnetic simulations across the entire telescope bandwidth, finding good agreement (within 13%). Moreover, our estimates exceed the SKA1-Low requirements at all considered frequencies by up to a factor of ∼2.3. Our results are very promising and allow for an initial validation of the AAVS2 prototype station performance, which is an important step toward the coming SKA1-Low telescope construction and science.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Giulia Macario, Giuseppe Pupillo, Gianni Bernardi, Pietro Bolli, Paola Di Ninni, Giovanni Comoretto, Andrea Mattana, Jader Monari, Federico Perini, Marco Schiaffino, Marcin Sokolowski, Randall Wayth, Jess Broderick, Mark Waterson, Maria Grazia Labate, Riccardo Chiello, Alessio Magro, Tom Booler, Andrew McPhail, Dave Minchin, and Raunaq Bhushan "Characterization of the SKA1-Low prototype station Aperture Array Verification System 2," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 8(1), 011014 (5 January 2022). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.8.1.011014
Received: 30 July 2021; Accepted: 1 December 2021; Published: 5 January 2022
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CITATIONS
Cited by 6 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Calibration

Polarization

Antennas

Sun

Prototyping

Telescopes

Observatories

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