CASPER: Digital Instrumentation for Radio Astronomy

CASPER：射电天文学数字仪器

• 批准号: 2307781
• 负责人: Jonathon Kocz
• 金额: $ 119.42万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-09-01 至 2026-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2307781&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CASPER; Digital; Instrumentation; Radio; Astronomy

The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) is an international community of astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists. The collaboration develops and maintains a collection of tools primarily used for radio astronomy research. This includes open-source hardware, software, libraries, and instrument designs. These tools can be used as templates to enable researchers to create the instruments they need to achieve their science goals in a cost effective and timely manner. CASPER hardware and software is used in over 100 instruments at astronomy observatories around the world. Instruments include everything from small experiments in undergraduate teaching labs to large, advanced telescope facilities. CASPER tools were used, for example, as part of the Event Horizon Telescope that produced the first images of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. They can also be used to drive advances in brain research, genomics, radar applications, and neutron and magnetic field imaging.CASPER research has positively impacted the cost and time scale for development of radio astronomy signal processing instrumentation. This project will leverage the past work of the CASPER community, in tandem with current developments in the super-computing industry, to provide the infrastructure to cost effectively build the next generation of astronomical instrumentation. This includes new wide-band spectrometers and transient-detection machines, correlators for large antenna arrays, and millimeter wave cameras. The low cost-of-entry associated with building instruments with CASPER technologies has allowed many students and early career scientists to gain instrument design experience using the same equipment and tools that are deployed at observatories. The new research to be undertaken in this project will assist in instrument designs for observatories and research groups to enable spectral imaging (correlation), beamforming, RFI mitigation, pulsar searching and timing, fast radio burst searching, SETI, VLBI, and wideband high-resolution spectroscopy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

天文学信号处理和电子研究合作组织 (CASPER) 是一个由天文学家、物理学家、工程师和计算机科学家组成的国际团体。该合作开发并维护了一系列主要用于射电天文学研究的工具。 这包括开源硬件、软件、库和仪器设计。这些工具可以用作模板，使研究人员能够创建所需的工具，以经济有效且及时的方式实现其科学目标。 CASPER 硬件和软件用于世界各地天文台的 100 多种仪器。 仪器包括从本科教学实验室的小型实验到大型先进的望远镜设施。例如，CASPER 工具被用作事件视界望远镜的一部分，该望远镜生成了我们银河系中心黑洞的第一张图像。 它们还可用于推动大脑研究、基因组学、雷达应用以及中子和磁场成像方面的进步。CASPER 研究对射电天文学信号处理仪器的开发成本和时间尺度产生了积极影响。该项目将利用 CASPER 社区过去的工作，结合超级计算行业当前的发展，提供基础设施，以经济高效地构建下一代天文仪器。这包括新型宽带光谱仪和瞬态检测机、大型天线阵列的相关器和毫米波相机。使用 CASPER 技术构建仪器的入门成本较低，使许多学生和早期职业科学家能够使用与天文台部署的相同设备和工具获得仪器设计经验。该项目将进行的新研究将协助天文台和研究小组进行仪器设计，以实现光谱成像（相关）、波束成形、RFI缓解、脉冲星搜索和定时、快速射电爆发搜索、SETI、VL​​BI和宽带高频该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。