SYSTEM NOISE ANALYSIS OF AN ULTRA WIDE BAND APERTURE ARRAY ELEMENT FOR LOW FREQUENCY RADIO ASTRONOMY

摘要

One of the biggest challenges in radio astronomy for the 21st century is the SKA telescope, the newest radio telescope in the world to be built as a Square Kilometre Array of antennas distributed in hundreds of stations to form an interferometric image of the sky. Below 1 GHz, these stations will be composed of thousands of inexpensive elements in a dense or sparse configuration delivering data to powerful digital processing systems. Low noise temperature will be crucial to achieve the ambitious survey speeds and sensitivity aimed for by astronomers. In this paper the authors analyze an ultra-wide band antenna embedded in an infinite periodic aperture array working at frequencies from 70 to 450 MHz. The aim is to study the trade-offs in terms of noise contributions present in such array.