KAREN Capability Fund Success!

The science team of Dr Slava Kitaeff (AUT), Dr Tim Molteno (UO) and Dr Melanie Johnston-Hollitt (VUW) with the technology support team of institutions BeSTGRID (Mr Nick Jones), BlueFern (Mr Peter Helms) and VentureSouthland (Mr Robin McNeil) were successful in obtaining a grant from the 2009 KAREN Capability Fund for a project entitled "Searching for the Unknown: Transient Radio Events Sensor Network". The project will see the deployment of a low frequency transient radio event sensor network across NZ which will allow detection of transient radio events occurring at 15-20 MHz. The core of the detector network will be the Digital Receiver Sensor (DRS) developed at the Centre for Reconfigurable Systems, AUT.

The DRS is based around Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology which is becoming increasingly important to radio astronomy. Depending on the configuration, each DRS will produce up to 10MB of data per second and the network of 10 devices will produce more than 8.6 Terabytes daily when running at maximum capacity. In this project data will be streamed continuously over the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN) and processed daily on HPC facilities of partner investigators.

Currently funded major telescopes like LOFAR and ASKAP have identified characterization of the transient radio sky as a high science priority and proposed instruments like the LWA plan to conduct science specifically on the transient radio sky (20 - 80 MHz) in the next decade. Instruments like the DRS will provide vital information on the frequency of both artificial and naturally occurring radio signals which will be vital to the survey design of these large low-frequency telescopes.

Some of the radio astronomy science goals include:

• detection and characterization of solar flares (cf Brodrick et al., 2003) and their associated ionospheric disturbances,
• Jovian emission,
• Gamma Ray Bursts and
• cosmic ray showers.

As part of this project we are offering 3 MSc scholarships in 2010 one each at; AUT working with Dr Kitaeff, Otago working with Dr Molteno and one at VUW with Dr Johnston-Hollitt. Please contact us for more details.