18,600 research outputs found
Program planning, chapter 5, part D
Recommendations for future activities necessary to support satellite microwave sensing are reported. Areas covered include component development, data processing, calibration, design and fabrication of multifrequency systems, and experimental test programs to establish interactions of electromagnetic waves and sensed parameters
Calibration Challenges for Future Radio Telescopes
Instruments for radio astronomical observations have come a long way. While
the first telescopes were based on very large dishes and 2-antenna
interferometers, current instruments consist of dozens of steerable dishes,
whereas future instruments will be even larger distributed sensor arrays with a
hierarchy of phased array elements. For such arrays to provide meaningful
output (images), accurate calibration is of critical importance. Calibration
must solve for the unknown antenna gains and phases, as well as the unknown
atmospheric and ionospheric disturbances. Future telescopes will have a large
number of elements and a large field of view. In this case the parameters are
strongly direction dependent, resulting in a large number of unknown parameters
even if appropriately constrained physical or phenomenological descriptions are
used. This makes calibration a daunting parameter estimation task, that is
reviewed from a signal processing perspective in this article.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 20 subfigures The title quoted in the meta-data
is the title after release / final editing
Blind Detection and Compensation of Camera Lens Geometric Distortions
This paper presents a blind detection and compensation technique for camera
lens geometric distortions. The lens distortion introduces higher-order
correlations in the frequency domain and in turn it can be detected using
higher-order spectral analysis tools without assuming any specific calibration
target. The existing blind lens distortion removal method only considered a
single-coefficient radial distortion model. In this paper, two coefficients are
considered to model approximately the geometric distortion. All the models
considered have analytical closed-form inverse formulae.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 2 table
The eSMA: description and first results
The eSMA ("extended SMA") combines the SMA, JCMT and CSO into a single
facility, providing enhanced sensitivity and spatial resolution owing to the
increased collecting area at the longest baselines. Until ALMA early science
observing (2011), the eSMA will be the facility capable of the highest angular
resolution observations at 345 GHz. The gain in sensitivity and resolution will
bring new insights in a variety of fields, such as protoplanetary/transition
disks, high-mass star formation, solar system bodies, nearby and high-z
galaxies. Therefore the eSMA is an important facility to prepare the grounds
for ALMA and train scientists in the techniques.
Over the last two years, and especially since November 2006, there has been
substantial progress toward making the eSMA into a working interferometer. In
particular, (i) new 345-GHz receivers, that match the capabilities of the SMA
system, were installed at the JCMT and CSO; (ii) numerous tests have been
performed for receiver, correlator and baseline calibrations in order to
determine and take into account the effects arising from the differences
between the three types of antennas; (iii) first fringes at 345 GHz were
obtained on August 30 2007, and the array has entered the science-verification
stage.
We report on the characteristics of the eSMA and its measured performance at
230 GHz and that expected at 345 GHz. We also present the results of the
commissioning and some initial science-verification observations, including the
first absorption measurement of the C/CO ratio in a galaxy at z=0.89, located
along the line of sight to the lensed quasar PKS1830-211, and on the imaging of
the vibrationally excited HCN line towards IRC+10216.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, paper number 7012-12, to appear in Proceedings
of SPIE vol. 7012: "Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes II", SPIE conference
on Astronomical Instrumentation, Marseille, 23-28 June 200
Image formation in synthetic aperture radio telescopes
Next generation radio telescopes will be much larger, more sensitive, have
much larger observation bandwidth and will be capable of pointing multiple
beams simultaneously. Obtaining the sensitivity, resolution and dynamic range
supported by the receivers requires the development of new signal processing
techniques for array and atmospheric calibration as well as new imaging
techniques that are both more accurate and computationally efficient since data
volumes will be much larger. This paper provides a tutorial overview of
existing image formation techniques and outlines some of the future directions
needed for information extraction from future radio telescopes. We describe the
imaging process from measurement equation until deconvolution, both as a
Fourier inversion problem and as an array processing estimation problem. The
latter formulation enables the development of more advanced techniques based on
state of the art array processing. We demonstrate the techniques on simulated
and measured radio telescope data.Comment: 12 page
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