Abstract Details
| Name: Yashwant Gupta Affiliation: NCRA - TIFR Conference ID: ASI2015_589 Title : The GMRT : Current Status and Future Prospects Authors and Co-Authors : Yashwant Gupta, NCRA-TIFR Abstract Type : Oral Abstract Category : Instrumentation and Techniques Abstract : The Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) is today a major international Radio Astronomy facility working in five discrete bands in the frequency range of 150 MHz to 1500 MHz, with a maximum instantaneous bandwidth of 32 MHz. Consisting of 30 fully steerable antennas of 45 metre diameter each, it can be used as an aperture-synthesis array for imaging, as well as a phased array to study compact radio sources such as pulsars. The GMRT has produced several important results in the past few years. Some recent interesting results will be highlighted. The GMRT is undergoing a major upgrade that will improve its sensitivity by a factor of upto three and make it a much more versatile instrument. The goal is to have seamless frequency coverage from about 100 to 1500 MHz, with a maximum instantaneous bandwidth of 400 MHz; improved receiver systems with higher G/Tsys; versatile digital back-end correlator and pulsar receiver using the latest FPGA and GPU technologies; revamped servo system; sophisticated monitor and control system; and matching improvements in infrastructure and computing. Several of these activities are past the prototyping phase and the sub systems are in mass production and delivery phase; an 8 antenna phase I of the u-GMRT has been released to internal users for trials. Overview of the upgrade activities, their current status and future plans will be covered. |