Calibration Challenges for Future Radio Telescopes

Abstract

Instruments for radio astronomical observations have come a long way. While the first telescopes were based on very large dishes and 2-antenna interferometers, current instruments consist of dozens of steerable dishes, whereas future instruments will be even larger distributed sensor arrays with a hierarchy of phased array elements. For such arrays to provide meaningful output (images), accurate calibration is of critical importance. Calibration must solve for the unknown antenna gains and phases, as well as the unknown atmospheric and ionospheric disturbances. Future telescopes will have a large number of elements and a large field of view. In this case the parameters are strongly direction dependent, resulting in a large number of unknown parameters even if appropriately constrained physical or phenomenological descriptions are used. This makes calibration a daunting parameter estimation task, that is reviewed from a signal processing perspective in this article.

12 pages, 7 figures, 20 subfigures The title quoted in the meta-data is the title after release / final editing.

References in corpus (6)

• The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview
• Ionospheric Calibration of Low Frequency Radio Interferometric Observations using the Peeling Scheme: I. Method Description and First Results
• Real-Time Calibration of the Murchison Widefield Array
• Multisource Self-calibration for Sensor Arrays
• Image formation in synthetic aperture radio telescopes
• Probing Fine-Scale Ionospheric Structure with the Very Large Array Radio Telescope

Cited by in corpus (19)

• LOFAR: The LOw-Frequency ARray
• The GMRT 150 MHz All-sky Radio Survey: First Alternative Data Release TGSS ADR1
• Observing pulsars and fast transients with LOFAR
• Image formation in synthetic aperture radio telescopes
• Fast gain calibration in radio astronomy using alternating direction implicit methods: Analysis and applications
• Space-based Aperture Array For Ultra-Long Wavelength Radio Astronomy
• The Bias and Uncertainty of Redundant and Sky-Based Calibration under Realistic Sky and Telescope Conditions
• Robust Calibration of Radio Interferometers in Non-Gaussian Environment
• Deep Learning Assisted Data Inspection for Radio Astronomy
• Redundancy Calibration of Phased Array Stations
• Observing the Reionization : Effect of Calibration and Position Errors on Realistic Observation Conditions
• The ROAD to discovery: machine learning-driven anomaly detection in radio astronomy spectrograms
• Hubble distancing: Focusing on distance measurements in cosmology
• A parallel & automatically tuned algorithm for multispectral image deconvolution
• Timing calibration and spectral cleaning of LOFAR time series data
• A measurement of small-scale features using ionospheric scintillation. Comparison with refractive shift measurements
• Calibration artefacts in radio interferometry. III. Phase-only calibration and primary beam correction
• A New Position Calibration Method for MUSER Images
• Square Kilometre Array station configuration using two-stage beamforming