The SKA New Instrumentation: Aperture Arrays

The radio frequency window of the Square Kilometre Array is planned to cover the wavelength regime from cm up to a few meters. For this range to be optimally covered, different antenna concepts are considered enabling many science cases. At the lowest frequency range, up to a few GHz, it is expected that multi-beam techniques will be used, increasing the effective field-of-view to a level that allows very efficient detailed and sensitive exploration of the complete sky. Although sparse narrow band phased arrays are as old as radio astronomy, multi-octave sparse and dense arrays now being considered for the SKA, requiring new low noise design, signal processing and calibration techniques. These new array techniques have already been successfully introduced as phased array feeds upgrading existing reflecting telescopes and for new telescopes to enhance the aperture efficiency as well as greatly increasing their field-of-view (van Ardenne et al., Proc IEEE 97(8):2009) by [1]. Aperture arrays use phased arrays without any additional reflectors; the phased array elements are small enough to see most of the sky intrinsically offering a large field of view.