Collaborative Research Projects in Australia: Radio Astronomy Dr. Greg Wickham (AARNet) Dr Tasso Tzioumis Dr Shaun Amy Dr Chris Phillips (CSIRO ATNF) Global Collaborations / APAN 28 th August 2007

Radio Interferometry  Telescopes focus on a source  Closest telescope has delay introduced  Data streams fed into correlator  Fringes are calculated:  Provides information on structure and position of radio source  Telescopes focused at different sources – no fringes

Building an Image  Telescopes maintain focus on source for a period of time  As the earth rotates more data is collected  Data fed into correlator  Similar in concept to “time lapse photograph”  Final image is interpolated

Visibility of Sources 

eVLBI Strategy  Now  1024 Mbps/telescope - 2 x 1Gbps  N x 1Gbps to correlators: Swinburne / Curtin --> 10 Gbps circuits?  International: JIVE (n x 1 Gbps); USA; Asia  3 years:  CABB correlator at Narrabri  Min: 2 x 10 Gbps (8Gbps) / telescope  N x 10 Gbps into Narrabri

eVLBI Strategy  5 years:  ASKAP  N x 10 Gbps per telescope to Correlators  New NSW site (Fowler’s Gap)  Connections to and in WA & NZ  10 years:  SKA  Candidates are Australia and South Africa  Extreme bandwidth required (up to Tbps)

eVLBI – Strategy in Motion  Huygens Transfer  VLBI  EXPReS  milestone in the progress towards SKA.  International collaborations are extremely important  Strategic to be involved  In Australia  eVLBI is ~ 10% of the ATNF observations  How is this going to evolve is not clear yet  And as ASKAP and the SKA come along, there will be bigger sectors of the community involved

VLBI - Huygens Space Probe

EXPReS  Data Path:  Telescopes to Marsfield  Marsfield to AARNet  AARNet to Jive  Trial:  June  3 x 256Mbit/sec streams  Using routed network  Full Test:  October  3 x 512Mbit/sec streams  Using circuits Parkes

EXPReS: Trial  3 x 256 Mbit / sec  Combined at Marsfield  Temporary 1G connection to AARNet  Routed connection back to JIVE  “Relatively Simple”

Final Experiment  3 x 512Mbit/sec  Direct patched in Sydney  Not to Scale!

Square Kilometer Array

Thank You!