Collaborative Digital Instrumentation for the Radio Astronomy Community

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The intent of this research is to develop general-purpose low-cost astronomical instrumentation that can be used by interested members of the community. Traditional radio astronomy instrumentation is highly specialized one-off type of hardware. This research will develop and optimize modular, connectible, and upgradable hardware components based upon Field-Programmable Gate Array technology, and platform-independent open-architecture software to drive the hardware. The components will be usable for single dish and interferometric radio astronomy data capture and analysis, and will offer relatively low-cost, common, scalable radio astronomy instrumentation to the worldwide radio astronomy community at large.