Speaker
Description
The Hydrogen Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) is a radio interferometer array built with the purpose of measuring the Hydrogen Intensity (H1) power spectrum. It will eventually consist of 1024 6m dishes and will operate in the frequency range of 400-800MHz. In order for HIRAX to achieve its goal of measuring the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs) in the power spectrum of neutral hydrogen, it will be critical to characterise the instrument's spectral and angular response accurately. Since HIRAX is a drift scan telescope and its dishes are not mounted motorised assemblies, this makes it insufficient for accurate beam response measurements. Motorised dishes are capable of scanning sources in the sky to map the beam. Point source transits through the beam will only provide 1D slices of the full 2D beam, which will not suffice for the calibration needs of the instrument. This necessitates the use of an artificial source that can be scanned through the beam to produce full 2D beam maps. In this project, we focus on the technique of characterizing the beam pattern using a drone equipped with a noise source. This approach allows for high signal-to-noise measurements of the telescope response at several positions in its beam in a short amount of time. This will be done by optimising the drone flight path, combining the intensity measured at the telescope and the recorded drone position to reconstruct the beam, and fitting a model to the measurements. We develop software pipelines using data from existing drone flights, which will initially be applied to early drone data taken at the two-element testbed array at Klerefontein.
| Stream | Science or Engineering |
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