Event calendar file
21-22 September 2020
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
Europe/Berlin timezone
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
-
Lecture Hall 0.02
Solar power mirror arrays for radio astronomy - towards a test with the Juelich Solar Power Tower
Speakers
- Alan ROY
- Olaf WUCKNITZ
Primary authors
- Alan ROY ()
Co-authors
- Olaf WUCKNITZ ()
- Dr. Ivan CAMARA MAYORGA (MPIfR)
Content
We have presented the idea at past meetings to use the mirror arrays of concentrating solar power stations as vast collecting areas for high-sensitivity radio astronomy. Since the signals do not combine coherently they will produce an extended speckle pattern over the focal region that requires a large phased array feed to collect and combine in-phase. The 4000 element EMBRACE array developed under the RadioNet SKADS project is such array feed and might conceivably be re-purposed for this application. We will give an update on the idea and the plans for a proof-of-concept experiment on the Juelich experimental solar array. For simplicity these start with a two-pixel receiver before scaling up.
