Breakthrough Technology
The DSA-2000 is enabled by two fundamental breakthroughs in radio telescope technology that together lower the cost per collecting area of the DSA-2000 by an order of magnitude relative to other arrays:
The DSA-2000 will break through a barrier in imaging performance with radio arrays via the “radio camera” approach.
The DSA-2000 will use ground-breaking ambient-temperature receivers and a low-cost antenna platform, building on established technology demonstrated via the precursor arrays.
The Radio Camera Approach
The data deluge problem in radio astronomy will be solved using a “radio camera” approach that provides end users with science ready images formed with a highly optimized streaming pipeline. This fundamental transition involves cross-correlation and gridding/imaging occurring within the same hardware platform (a GPU), with flagging and calibration applied on-the-fly. Visibilities are not stored long-term. This reduces the data sent to the public archive from the DSA-2000 from 20 Exabytes a year (visibilities) to ~1 Petabyte a year (images).
Antenna signals enter the Radio Camera Frontend (RCF), are digitized, channelized and undergo a corner turn (matrix transpose). They then enter the Radio Camera Processor (RCP), where the X-engine, flagging, calibration and gridding/imaging all occur. The dashed line encompasses processing typically carried out within a traditional correlator digital back-end, or about ~15% of the processing carried out by the radio camera. Radio camera hardware will include 2000 dual ADCs, 2,000 FPGAs, >5,000 GPUs, 27,000 CPU cores and 0.5 PB of RAM.
A Low-cost Antenna and Receiver Package
The DSA-2000 will use a low-cost antenna platform and ground-breaking ambient-temperature receivers.
A low-cost fully steerable antenna, mount and drive package
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The DSA-2000 system temperature Tsys will be 17 K (band averaged) at zenith, increasing by 5 K at a zenith angle of 60 deg due to spillover, with aperture efficiency of 70%. This significantly exceeds requirements specified in the Astro2020 white paper.
A New Generation Antenna
The DSA-2000 builds on established technology demonstrated via the precursor arrays (DSA-10 and the NSF/MSIP-funded DSA-110).