2-6 September 2024
CJD Bonn Castell
Europe/Berlin timezone
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Contribution

LAMBDA - the Low-frequency Australian Megametre Baseline Demonstrator Array.

Speakers

  • Dr. Cormac REYNOLDS

Primary authors

Co-authors

Content

SKA-Low is being constructed in Western Australia and due to become operational in 2027. With a maximum baseline length of 65 Km SKA-Low will be unable to provide high resolution observations on its own, but will have a multi-beam tied array capability allowing it to participate as an element in conventional VLBI arrays. By this means the community will be able to pursue some of the high-sensitivity high-resolution science cases that have been described. Currently there is a dearth of low frequency telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere which can be leveraged to provide a VLBI array for co-observing with SKA-Low. To address this issue we have proposed LAMBDA - the Low-frequency Australian Megametre Baseline Demonstrator Array.

LAMBDA is planned to be a 5-6 station array disributed across Australia leveraging the existing site infrastructure of the cm-wavelength Long Baseline Array. Individual stations will comprise: - 256 dual-polarization dipoles providing comparable sensitivity to a single SKA station. - a bespoke CSIRO-designed backend design which aims to leverage a low-cost, largely COTS, system with great flexibility for multi-beam single station processing (e.g. RFI mitigation, transient searching, pulsar timing, SETI searches, all-sky monitoring) - power and timing leveraged from existing LBA infrastructure - data transport and correlation leveraging existing LBA infrastructure

In this talk I will describe the LAMBDA system, outline the planned roll-out and briefly describe some of the science cases driving this development.