The Australian SKA Pathfinder

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a next-generation radio telescope of great complexity and technological ambition.

It will be the most powerful survey radio-astronomy instrument in existence, and a world-class telescope in its own right as well as being a key demonstrator instrument for new technologies for the SKA. It will comprise an array of 36 dish antennas, each 12 metres in diameter.

ASKAP is led by the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in collaboration with leading scientists and engineers in the Netherlands, Canada, United Kingdom and Germany, as well as colleagues from a number of Australian universities.

When completed this instrument will be located in the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), a superb radio-quiet site in the Mid West region of Western Australia, Australia’s SKA candidate site.

ICRAR will play a key role in the definition of ASKAP science as well as ASKAP science archive data management.

With its fast survey speed and phased array feed technology, ASKAP will be one of the premier radio telescope facilities in the world and will conduct major legacy surveys over its first years of operation, providing reference datasets for the international community in years to come.  ICRAR staff are playing lead roles in several of these surveys.

Photos and movies of ASKAP as well as the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.   

WALLABY

The Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind surveY (WALLABY) will survey the sky visible with ASKAP for emission from neutral hydrogen gas (HI).  This will produce a reference HI-source catalogue covering 75% of the sky and containing ~500,000 HI-rich galaxies, more than twenty times more than any previous blind HI catalogue.  Neutral hydrogen is a fundamental fuel for star formation and an important tracer of the interstellar material in galaxies and galaxy kinematics.  WALLABY will study a number science questions including: galaxy formation and the missing satellite problem in the Local Group of galaxies;  evolution and star-formation in galaxies; mergers and interactions in galaxies; the HI mass function and its variation with galaxy density; physical processes governing the distribution and evolution of cool gas at low redshifts; cosmological parameters relating to gas-rich galaxies; and the nature of the cosmic web.

DINGO

Deep Investigation of Neutral Gas Origins (DINGO) directly addresses one of the key science aims of ASKAP and will study the evolution of HI from the current epoch to a time when the universe was two thirds its present age.  With deep observations of a small number of ASKAP fields, in excess of 100,000 galaxies are expected out to redshift ~0.4.  Changes in the cosmic density of neutral hydrogen will be studied along with key functions tracing: the distribution of HI mass, the clustering of gas-rich galaxies, and the dark matter halo properties of gas-rich galaxies.  Observations will be targeted at the GAMA survey regions, facilitating a detailed multi-wavelength analysis using galaxy-by-galaxy tracers of structure, star-formation rate, stellar and dust mass, environment and optical line properties, along with 250k confirmed target redshifts. These will be combined with ASKAP data to enable a thorough study of the co-evolution of the stellar, baryonic, and dark matter content of galaxies, constituting the first comprehensive study of these components over the past 4 billion years with well matched sensitivities, resolutions and depths.

CRAFT

ICRAR is leading a project to discover and comprehend the mysterious class of sources known as `Fast Radio Transients'. These appear and disappear on very short timescales, making them hard to detect and even harder to identify. Their short timescale and extreme brightness imply the very highest energies for these objects, far surpassing the energies achievable on earth -- even that of the LHC. We are bypassing the standard ASKAP hardware to add the functionality which will allow the detection of these objects. We are researching the possible sources which produce these signals (merging neutron stars or evaporating black holes for example), modelling the modulation of the signals by our galaxy and beyond, and developing the software and hardware required to capture these signals in real time.

The Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory

As Western Australia's key offering to radio astronomy and the SKA project, the MRO is an ICRAR priority.

As well as the Australian SKA Pathfinder the MRO will also host a range of other SKA pathfinder instruments, including the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a low frequency radio telescope being commissioned by an international consortium.

ICRAR staff are playing a leading role in the development and roll-out of the this instrument. As the first mover instrument on the MRO, the MWA will be important in showcasing the Murchison site.