ASKAP

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope will be built in Western Australia and operational by ~2013. The project is led by CSIRO ATNF in collaboration with scientists and engineers in Canada, the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany, as well as colleagues from a number of Australian universities and industry partners. The aim of this wiki page is to provide information about the ASKAP telescope and to start discussion on submitting some “expressions of interest” for pulsar related projects using ASKAP.

We have created a web forum that should be used for general comments, queries and discussion.

Pulsar ASKAP Team Organisation

Generic Areas of Interest

Here we list the names assigned to each of the general aspects of the ASKAP pulsar proposal. It has been recommended that teams are formed with a specific person appointed to be the chairperson for each group (that is perform some form of management role).

It’s likely that the ‘simulation’ aspect may need to be further refined into some sub-projects as this is likely to be a core aspect of the initial part of the work and relies on many different sets of skills.

• Science team point of contact: Stairs
• Liaison between science team and ASKAP engineers: Keith, Hobbs
• Liaison with other ASKAP EoI teams: Hotan, Stairs, Colgate, Chatterjee

• Verification of integrity of beams formed by beamformers on BETA and ASKAP: Johnston, Kaspi, Stairs, Stappers
• Simulations of optimal observing patterns, backend types and integration times, given telescope configuration, FOV, number of tied beams, known pulsars, propagation effects: Bailes, Chatterjee, Cordes, Kaspi, Lorimer, Shannon, Smits, Stappers, Stairs, van Leeuwen, Possenti, Stappers, Lazio
• Investigation of required vs. calibratable polarization purity Manchester, van Straten, Colgate
• Pulsar timing backend hardware provision, implementation and troubleshooting Bailes, Kramer, Manchester, Stairs, Stappers, van Leeuwen
• Pulsar timing backend software provision and troubleshooting: Bailes, Hotan, Kramer, Kondratiev, Lorimer, Manchester, Stairs, van Leeuwen, van Straten
• Pulsar timing data pipeline software, including planning insertion of data into archive: Bailes, Becker, Hobbs, Hotan, Kaspi, Kondratiev, Lorimer, Majid, Nice, Possenti, Stairs, van Straten
• Multiwavelength follow-up Becker, Chatterjee, Kaspi, Rea, Torres, Arzoumanian
• Search software/pipeline development: Keith, Bhat, Kondratiev, Lorimer, Ransom, Stairs, Burgay, Crawford
• Search instrumentation development: Majid, Stairs, van Straten
• Survey data management: Crawford, ???
• Outreach & Community benefit: Becker, Hobbs, Burgay, Crawford

Specific contributions of time and resources

Here I approximate the time contributions that people have suggested that they might be able to contribute to the project:

• J. Lazio: ~50% post-doc
• A. Posentti: ~1 student or equivalent time
• M. Burgay: ~1 student or equivalent time
• M. Kramer: ~20% post-doc
• B. Stappers: ~50% post-doc

ASKAP details

The main ASKAP web-site can be found here. An overview of the “Science with ASKAP” is given in Johnston et al. (2008) and more details are provided in Science with ASKAP (Accepted by Experimental Astronomy; 112 pages). ASKAP will contain 36 antennas each 12m in diameter, capable of high dynamic range imaging and using wide-field-of-view phased array feeds.