Characterization of the SKA1-Low prototype station Aperture Array Verification System 2

TL;DR

This paper characterizes the performance of the SKA1-Low prototype station AAVS2 through commissioning observations, calibration, and sensitivity analysis, demonstrating it exceeds requirements and validates its readiness for the SKA-Low telescope construction.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive performance characterization of the AAVS2 prototype, including calibration procedures, all-sky imaging, and sensitivity estimates, supporting SKA-Low construction.

Findings

AAVS2 sensitivity exceeds SKA1-Low requirements at all tested frequencies.

Calibration and imaging procedures successfully characterized station performance.

Good agreement between measured sensitivity and electromagnetic simulations.

Abstract

The low frequency component of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA1-Low) will be an aperture phased array located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) site in Western Australia. It will be composed of 512 stations, each of them consisting of 256 log-periodic dual polarized antennas, and will operate in the low frequency range (50 MHz - 350 MHz) of the SKA bandwidth. The Aperture Array Verification System 2 (AAVS2), operational since late 2019, is the last full-size engineering prototype station deployed at the MRO site before the start of the SKA1-Low construction phase. The aim of this paper is to characterize the station performance through commissioning observations at six different frequencies (55, 70, 110, 160, 230 and 320 MHz) collected during its first year of activities. We describe the calibration procedure, present the resulting all-sky images and their analysis, and discuss the station calibratability and system stability. Using the difference imaging method, we also derive estimates of the SKA1-Low sensitivity for the same frequencies, and compare them to those obtained through electromagnetic simulations across the entire telescope bandwidth, finding good agreement (within $\leq 13%$). Moreover, our estimates exceed the SKA1-Low requirements at all the considered frequencies, by up to a factor of $\sim$2.3. Our results are very promising and allow an initial validation of the AAVS2 prototype station performance, which is an important step towards the upcoming SKA-Low telescope construction and science.