Progress of the MeerKAT Radio Telescope on the road to the Square Kilometre Array - a.k.a. building universe scaled laboratories - National ...

Progress of the MeerKAT Radio
Telescope on the road to the
Square Kilometre Array

 a.k.a. building universe scaled laboratories…

Testing General Relativity                  Cosmic Dawn
 (Strong Regime, Gravitational Waves)       (First Stars and Galaxies)

                                               Galaxy Evolution
       Cradle of Life
                                            (Normal Galaxies z~2-3)
 (Planets, Molecules, SETI)

                                             Cosmology
        Cosmic Magnetism         (Dark Energy, Large Scale Structure)
        (Origin, Evolution)
                               Exploration of the Unknown
Broadest range of science of any facility, worldwide
                                             Image and text by SKA Organisation

Image: NASA

Picture: China’s Xinhua News Agency

MeerKAT construction - Dishes
                                64 x 13.5m
                                highly efficient
                                offset Gregorian
                                dishes
                                spread over 8
                                km (~75% within
                                ~1km diameter)

MeerKAT construction – Feeds and Digitisers

Ae/Tsys
Diameter = 13.5m

Collecting area of 143m2 per antenna

(~9160m2 for the array, or the equivalent of a single 108m
dish)

System temperature ~ 23K

A single MeerKAT Receptor achieves 6.1m2/K in L band

For the 64 antenna array ~ 390m2/K

Extremely good L-band performance

MeerKAT construction – Time and
     Frequency Reference

MeerKAT construction – Correlator
         Beamformer

Data Rates

Storage Pod:

48 x 8TByte Hard Drives

Storage Solution:
55 x Storage Pods
~ 21PBytes of Raw Storage Capacity

Radio Frequency Interference

Human Capital Development
       Number of Bursaries, Fellowships and
            Grants by Field of Study
1200
                                      1054
1000

 800
                    635
 600
          415
 400

 200
                              4
   0

MeerKAT construction – Array Releases

•   Array releases: planned
    engineering milestones to
    enable early integration, test,
    verification and observations
    to support this
•   AR1 – June 2016
•   AR1.5 – March 2017
•   AR2 – October 2017
•   AR3 – March 2018

•   Now in commissioning
    phase…
•   …and science use

MeerKAT Operational Status

Part 2: SKA
• International Project with 11 Member Countries

• NGO process

• Wrapping up design process

• Contracting

• Construction

Telescope Hosting – Shared Skies

 Australia              South Africa

SKA – NGO
• Signatures by end 2018?

• Ratification process by end 2019??

• Establishment of IGO by 1H 2020???

SKA Design Process
• Series of Critical
  Design Reviews for
  elements

• Dish Element should
  conclude by 1H 2019

• Some technical
  challenges not yet
  solved

SKA – Contracting
• In-kind and cash
  contributions

• Expressions of
  Interest

• Feeds into IGO
  process too

SKA – construction
• Many dependencies…

• Once all prior processes are completed, maybe 2020????

SKA – speeding up the process
• Early Production Array

• Add SKA dishes to MeerKAT (between 6 and 20
  mentioned)

• Use this to industrialise the dishes

Beyond MeerKAT and SKA
• User Supplied Equipment (Plug-in to MeerKAT)

• Guest Instruments

User Supplied Equipment
PTUSE - Pulsar Timing (Commissioning)

MLUSE - MeerLicht tie-up for pointing (Commissioning)

S band - S-band receivers from MPIFR (Lab integration,
qualification)

FBFUSE - Filterbank Beamformer (Lab integration, HW installed)

TUSE – MeerTRAP Transient search (HW installed)

APSUSE - Pulsar search (HW installed)

BLUSE - Breakthrough Listen – SETI (Some HW installed)

IPUSE - Real-time transient imaging (Idle)

Guest Instruments:
• HIRAX

• CBASS

• HERA

• MFAA Demonstrator

• Some applications in progress:

• An experiment to investigate Sprites

• GNSS/Geodesy Station

Ha khensa                            Thank you
                        Enkosi
     Dankie                          Re a leboha
                        Siyabonga

 Re a leboga                        Ria livhuwa
                        Gangans
http://www.ska.ac.za/                 francois.kapp@ska.ac.za