Experiments on the dish verification antenna china for the SKA

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• 作者：Xiaoming Chai ; Bin Liu ; Lei Yu ; Shenghua Yu ; Di Wu ; Lijia Liu
• 关键词：Single ; piece CFRP reflector ; Pointing accuracy ; Aperture efficiency ; DVA ; C ; SKA
• 刊名：Experimental Astronomy
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：December 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：42
• 期：3
• 页码：301-317
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Physics and Astronomy
• 刊物主题：Astronomy, Observations and Techniques; Statistics for Engineering, Physics, Computer Science, Chemistry and Earth Sciences;
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1572-9508
• 卷排序：42

文摘

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is expected to become the world’s most powerful radio telescope at meter and centimeter wavelength in the coming decades. The construction of SKA will be divided into two phases. The first phase (SKA1), scheduled for completion in 2023, will construct 10 % of the whole collecting area. The second phase (SKA2) will build the rest 90 % collecting area. The SKA1 consists of several types of arrays including SKA1-low and SKA1-mid. The latter is a dish array consisting of ~200 medium-size antennas. The integrated dish array in SKA2 will expand to 2500 dishes, spreading 3000 kilometers across the southern part of Africa. The demanding specifications and enormous number of the SKA dish raise challenges in the dish development such as mass production with high performance at low cost, quick installation and high reliability. Dish Verification Antenna China (DVA-C) was built as one of three initial prototypes. A novel single-piece panel reflector made of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) was adopted. In this study, an L-band receiver is installed to make DVA-C a complete system for experiments on antenna performance test and preliminary observations. The performance of DVA-C including the system noise temperature, pointing accuracy, antenna pattern, and aperture efficiency has been tested. Preliminary observations such as pulsars and HI are then conducted, which indicates that the DVA-C can not only serve as an educational instrument and key technology test bed, but also be applied for scientific work such as pulsar timing, all-sky HI survey, multi-frequency monitoring of variable sources etc.