An exciting and scientifically important frontier of modern astronomy is the push to understand the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), a time in the distant past when the first stars began to influence the material between galaxies. This era is also referred to as "Cosmic Dawn", and has been identified as potentially rife with new discoveries and one of the key problems to be understood in the near future. With that in mind, some innovative instrumentation has been under development, including new radio-astronomy arrays suchs as the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER). The precise extraction of the needed information from such instruments requires unusual measures for instrument calibration, and this proposal addresses that need by building ECHO, a helicopter drone to carry a test transmitter over the telescope array and investigate its actual spatial response pattern to a very high precision.
A key obstacle to extracting the information on astrophysical processes from data measured by the new generation of telescope arrays is the accurate removal of foreground emission due to extraneous sources unrelated to the EoR emission being sought. That foreground emission problem depends critically on an accurate knowledge of the as-built primary beam of each telescope in the array. Current techniques, such as beam modeling, are uncertain at the 20% level; this project intends to push that limit down to 1% for MWA and PAPER. The scientific payoff is potentially very large.
The ECHO project will recruit and train undergraduates interested in electronics and field experiments, and will feature strong student involvement in many phases of design, construction, and testing.
Funding for this project is being provided by NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences through its Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation program.
