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Signal Processing for Radio Astronomy

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Handbook of Signal Processing Systems

Abstract

Radio astronomy is known for its very large telescope dishes but is currently making a transition towards the use of a large number of small antennas. For example, the Low Frequency Array, commissioned in 2010, uses about 50 stations each consisting of 96 low band antennas and 768 or 1536 high band antennas. The low-frequency receiving system for the future Square Kilometre Array is envisaged to initially consist of over 131,000 receiving elements and to be expanded later. These instruments pose interesting array signal processing challenges. To present some aspects, we start by describing how the measured correlation data is traditionally converted into an image, and translate this into an array signal processing framework. This paves the way to describe self-calibration and image reconstruction as estimation problems. Self-calibration of the instrument is required to handle instrumental effects such as the unknown, possibly direction dependent, response of the receiving elements, as well a unknown propagation conditions through the Earth’s troposphere and ionosphere. Array signal processing techniques seem well suited to handle these challenges. Interestingly, image reconstruction, calibration and interference mitigation are often intertwined in radio astronomy, turning this into an area with very challenging signal processing problems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With abuse of notation, as m, n are not related to the time variables used earlier.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Delft, Faculty of EEMCS, Delft, The Netherlands

    Alle-Jan van der Veen

  2. Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), Dwingeloo, The Netherlands

    Stefan J. Wijnholds

  3. University of Groningen, Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Ahmad Mouri Sardarabadi

Authors
  1. Alle-Jan van der Veen
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  2. Stefan J. Wijnholds
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  3. Ahmad Mouri Sardarabadi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alle-Jan van der Veen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of ECE and UMIACS, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya

  2. Leiden Embedded Research Center, Leiden University Leiden Institute Advanced Computer Science, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Ed F. Deprettere

  3. RWTH Aachen University Software for Systems on Silicon, Aachen, Germany

    Rainer Leupers

  4. Department of Pervasive Computing, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

    Jarmo Takala

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van der Veen, AJ., Wijnholds, S.J., Sardarabadi, A.M. (2019). Signal Processing for Radio Astronomy. In: Bhattacharyya, S., Deprettere, E., Leupers, R., Takala, J. (eds) Handbook of Signal Processing Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91734-4_9

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