Progress of LOFAR , the European Low Frequency Array Radiotelescope
The construction of this instrument is making good progress :
http://www.lofar.org/index.htm
LOFAR will be a very powerful high resolution imaging interferometer
for the 10-240 Mhz band. Jovian Radio Astronomy will be just one of its
capabilities.
The budget is 250 million euros, and I believe about half of it is
funded by the Netherlands, the rest by many European Institutions :
http://www.lofar.org/p/geninfo_consortium.htm
The instrument will have thousands of low band antennas similar to this prototype :
There will be low band and high band antennas, optimized for the 30-80 Mhz and 120-240 Mhz bands.
I understand the actual low band antennas will look more like
these, in the central core station CS1 near Exloo Netherlands :
I assume the ground plane of this antenna is covered by soil, and grass is growing through it.
The instrument will be capable of performing image synthesis or of forming up
to 24 simultaneous pencil beams (with the central core), steerable in any
direction.
This map shows the layout of the central stations in the Netherlands
and some of the outlying stations. Each station has at least 96
antennas.
This is a broader view
The first international station is next to the Effelsberg Germany 100 meter Radio Telescope of the Max Planck Institute for Radio
Astronomy .
Other stations will be located in France, Sweden, and the UK.
The leading institution in the development of LOFAR is ASTRON, an Institute of the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research, NWO .
I understand they plan is to have at least 36
stations, each with 96 antennas or more, by the end of 2009. The
current funding is for 15000 antennas with maximum baselines of 100 km.
The central computer is an IBM BlueGene/L at the University of
Groningen, processing at tens of Teraflops, and receiving data,
via optical fibers, at Terabit/s rates.
This is the building that houses it :
I look forward to reading the Papers and using the Archive that will come out of this instrument.
Victor Herrero
