The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) is the world’s largest and most sensitivity radio telescope at low frequencies, having led to hundreds of scientific papers. LOFAR started as a technology demonstrator to see what is possible using phase array technology. The telescope consist of thousands of small, cheap antennas distributed over a large area. The antenna signals are digitized and transported to a central node where they are combined into science data products (i.e. images). Several challenges which needed to be solved will be discussed in the talk, ranging from physical problems (e.g. animals and humidity) to stringent RF requirements (e.g. clock synchronization and calibration) to very high data transport and processing rates (>TB/s) to ionospheric distortions.
The largest part of LOFAR is located in the Netherlands, which is, however, far from radio quite. LOFAR can detect astronomy signals which is a quadrillion (120dB) time smaller than the man-made RF signals present at the telescope. In order to achieve this, new technology had to be developed. Some of this new technologies will be presented in the talk, such as low-noise, high-linearity RF chains, analog and digital beamforming, RFI flagging and low-RFI solar and wind farms.
Due to the success of LOFAR, the telescope has been growing as more countries joined the International LOFAR Telescope and add LOFAR antennas in their countries. The talk will conclude with a few words about the future of LOFAR and large phase array telescopes.
Dr. Paulus Kruger, System Engineer at Astron
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