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En route to the�Square Kilometre Array

Steve Torchinsky�Nançay Radioastronomy Facility�(Obs de Paris)�SKADS Project Scientist

www.skads-eu.org

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Square Kilometre Array

  • Science goals
  • Technical overview
  • Worldwide efforts in SKA
  • Technological development in Europe
  • Time line
  • Future development

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SKA Key Science

?

Tests of gravity

Epoch of Reionisation

Cosmic Magnetism

Cradle of Life

Large Scale Structure

Transient Universe

The Unknown

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Strong Field Tests of Gravity

Binary orbit permits determination of masses

Relativistic effects permit (re) determination of masses.

ALL MUST AGREE

http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pulsar/

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Strong Field Tests of Gravity

  • Large surveys will find exotic binarys
    • ~20 000 pulsars in the galaxy
    • Nearly edge-on Pulsar – Black-hole binary (at least one)
      • Probe eg. Frame dragging, cosmic censorship, no hair theorem
  • Pulsar timing array
    • Gravitational wave background

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Probing the Dark Ages

  • When did the first luminous objects form?
  • How did they form and over what period of time?

​

  • SKA will detect the Epoch of Reionisation and map the evolution history of the first luminous objects

Di Matteo et al

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Cosmic Magnetism

Faraday rotation of > 107 polarised background sources

Origin of magnetic fields

    • Dynamo?
    • Primordial?

​

NGC 891 (Krause)

M 51 VLA+Eff 6cm

(Fletcher & Beck)

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Large Scale Structure

Billions of galaxies!

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Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations

  • Improve signal confidence by measuring wiggles in separate redshift bins
  • A catalog of a billion galaxies
  • Position and redshift measured simultaneously
  • There are fluctuations at all scales but there is a preferred scale of around 1 deg.

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Complementarity with Planck

1%

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Cradle of Life

  • Protoplanetary disks resolved to Earth-like orbits
  • Organic molecules
    • methanol (834 MHz)
    • acetaldehyde (1.1 GHz)
    • acetamide (9.2 GHz)
    • cyclopropenone (9.3 GHz)
    • propenal (26 GHz)
  • Extrasolar planets

G. Bryden / NASA

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Indicators of �Extra Terrestrial Intelligence

Project

Phoenix

Allen

Telescope

Array

SKA

Jill Tarter

SETI at leakage levels from nearby stars

eg:

  • planetary radar
  • Interplanetary communication
  • Interstellar communication

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Transient signal

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Transients

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Transient signal

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Transients

  • Pulsar is a special case of transient phenomena (periodic)
  • Giant pulses
  • Supernova
  • Bursters
  • ETI

​

requires:

  • fast time constant
  • memory buffer for post analysis
  • wide instantaneous, fully-sampled FoV

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The Unknown

  • New discoveries always result from observations in new parameter space
    • sensitivity
    • spatial resolution
    • spectral resolution
    • polarisation
    • time domain
    • observing speed (multibeaming)
  • eg. CMB, pulsars, extra solar planets,…

SKA improves all of these

SKA is designed for the Key Projects but with an overriding design philosophy of flexibility to maximise the likelihood of new discoveries

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SKA Science Book

Chris Carilli & Steve Rawlings,

New Astronomy Reviews, Vol.48, Elsevier, Dec. 2004

​

http://www.skads-eu.org/p/SKA_SciBook.php

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Cosmology, Galaxy Formation

and Astroparticle Physics on

the Pathway to the SKA

Hans-Rainer Klöckner, Steve Rawlings,

Matt Jarvis, Angela Taylor (eds.)

Cosmology, Galaxy Formation and Astroparticle Physics on the Pathway to the SKA

Available online:

www.skads-eu.org (click “memos” or “documents”)

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Possible SKA Configuration

Station

Core ~5km dia

Central

Processing

Facility

Comms links

Not to scale!

180km

Dishes spread

along spiral

Dishes

AA-hi

AA-lo

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Three Technologies

  • ~5km inner cores
    • sparse aperture arrays (eg. LOFAR)
    • dense aperture arrays (eg. EMBRACE)
    • parabolic dishes
  • Outer core ~5km of stations
  • Arms > 5km of stations
  • dishes spread out along spiral arms
  • maximum baseline of ~3000km

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candidate site: South Africa

  • Karoo radio quiet zone

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Candidate site: Australia

  • Mileura Radio Quiet Zone

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Worldwide SKA efforts

  • Europe
    • LOFAR
    • Square Kilometre Array Design Studies
      • 4 year study, 38MEuro (11MEuro from EU Framework Programme 6)
      • EMBRACE demonstrator at Westerbork and Nançay
    • PrepSKA
      • EU FP7 5.5MEuro, 2008-2011
      • Central Design Integration Team in Manchester
    • SKA on ESFRI Roadmap
  • Australia & Canada
    • AU$56M announced in 2007 Australian budget
    • ASKAP demonstrator
  • South Africa
    • Karoo Array Telescope and MeerKAT
    • Over US$200M confirmed by SA gov’t for construction, infrastructure, including high capacity network to Karoo region.
  • USA
    • Allen Telescope Array
    • Technology Demonstrator Programme

www.skads-eu.org

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http://cordis.europa.eu/esfri/

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ASTRONET�Infrastructure Roadmap

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SKA timeline

Review

Hi-freq SKA

Design

06 | 08 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 18 | 20 | 22 | 24 |

System Design

SKA mid + low construction and commissioning

SKA-hi Construction

Sites �short-listed

EC-FP7: PrepSKA

System design Funding

Governance Site Selection

Preliminary SKA specs

External Engineering Review of design

Reference Design selected

Pathfinder Suite Construction

Early Science SKA mid+low

SKA-mid+low

Complete

SKA Pathfinders

Complete

System design SKA-hi

Costed SKA low+mid designs complete

Pathfinder science

Phase 1 complete

Concept Des’n

Site

Select

Production Readiness Review

SKA-mid+low

Concept design for SKA-hi

Phase 1 construction and commissioning

FP7: PrepSKA

[Path2SKA]

[AAVS]

http://www.skatelescope.org

FP6: SKADS

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SKA in Europe

  • Square Kilometre Array Design Studies
    • 1 July 2005 to 30 June 2009
    • 26 institutes in 13 countries
    • 38MEuro (including matching funds and EU funds)
    • Detailed design and costing, including science simulations, signal transport, processing requirements, construction costs,…
    • www.skads.eu.org/p/memos.php
    • Marie-Curie Conferences and Training

​

www.skads-eu.org

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Training the next generation

  • 1st MCCT School�Medicina 23-29 Sept 2007
  • Wide field imaging and calibration�Groningen 2-7 March
  • Synergies with the SKA�Bonn 14-18 April 2008
  • Deep Field Imaging with SKA�Cambridge 25-29 Aug
  • Radioastronomy and the New Instruments�Siguenza 27 Aug – 4 Sept
  • Multifield and multibeam science with SKA�Oxford 15-27 March 2009

​

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EMBRACE

  • Electronic MultiBeam Radio Astronomy ConcEpt
  • Aperture-Plane phased-array
  • 500MHz – 1500MHz
  • Linear polarisation
  • 96m2 at Westerbork
  • 64m2 at Nançay

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EMBRACE Tile

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Nançay Beamformer Chip

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EMBRACE observations of the Sun

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Simulations for the SKA

image by D. Obreschkow

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Simulations for the SKA

Effort in SKADS:

  • Catalog of continuum sources (250 Million sources)
  • Epoch of Reionisation (tomography from z≈15 to z≈6)
  • The Cosmic Web
  • Pulsars

​

  • See SKADS Simulated Skies website
    • www.skads-eu.org/p/s-cubed.php
  • See Proceedings of the Pushchino Meeting
    • www.skads-eu.org/memos.php
    • And others listed there, available on astro-ph

​

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SKADS Science and Technology

The Universe

Our understanding of the Universe

Sky Simulation (DS2T1)

Convolution with the telescope (DS2T2)

Network simulator (DS3T3)

Technology development �(DS4)

Technology demonstrators�(DS5 & DS6)

observations

brain power

Catalogs, images, EM fields

voltages

measurements�and�simulated performance

Request spec change�BENCHMARK

Backend data

Data imaging�(DS2T2)

Simulated telescope image

Data analysis (DS2)

science goals achievable?

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SKADS Science and Technology

The Universe

Our understanding of the Universe

Sky Simulation (DS2T1)

Convolution with the telescope (DS2T2)

Network simulator (DS3T3)

Technology development �(DS4)

Technology demonstrators�(DS5 & DS6)

observations

brain power

voltages

measurements�and�simulated performance

Backend data

Data imaging�(DS2T2)

Simulated telescope image

Request spec change�BENCHMARK

Catalogs, images, EM fields

Data analysis (DS2)

science goals achievable?

Consider trade-offs

NO: not technologically feasible

NO: too expensive

YES: We can do better than that !

SKADS�Design & Costing

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SKA Design and Costing

  • SKADS final deliverable “Designed and Costed SKA”
  • First memo: detailed design
    • www.skads-eu.org/memos.php
    • SKA Memo #93
    • ~1.5BEuro
  • Development of costing tool: SKACost
    • Designed and costed components and subsystems
    • Data base for costing different SKA implementations
    • SKADS in collaboration with International SKA Program Office

​

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SKADS Science Simulations

?

In the context of technological constraints

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SKADS after 2009

  • EU-FP6 project SKADS ends 30 June, 2009
  • Overlap with PrepSKA (EU FP7)
    • European led
    • Starts 1 April, 2008
    • Worldwide participation:
      • EU, Australia, South Africa, Canada, USA, China
    • International SKA Program Development Office in Manchester
    • Governance
    • Technology development
  • Path2SKA (EU FP7 Marie-Curie)
    • Sky simulations to telescope simulations for virtual observations
    • Led by Steve Rawlings, Oxford
  • Aperture-Array Verification System (under discussion)
    • Larger than EMBRACE
    • Dual polarisation (perhaps all-digital)
    • In southern Europe (Spain or Portugal)

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Aperture Array Verification System

~few hundred m2, national funds, in southern Europe

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Contact

Steve Torchinsky

SKADS Project Scientist

USN, Observatoire de Paris

Phone: +33 1 45 07 75 02

Email: Steve.Torchinsky@obspm.fr

Web: http://www.skads-eu.org

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