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MMA Memo #233

The design of MMA configurations of intermediate extent

Adrian Webster (Royal Observatory Edinburgh, Scotland)

October 19, 1998

Keywords: Aperture synthesis, array design, telescope design

A design for the intermediate configurations of the MMA is presented in which the stations are distributed in a circularly-symmetrical fashion about the centre of the array, with the density of stations dropping as the inverse square of the distance from the centre. There are no fixed configurations within this distribution, and instead a scheme is presented in which the antennas are sited at any given time on an annular region between an inner radius b and an outer radius a. There are many such annuli possible, with different average radii, so the telescope acquires a `zoom' property in that the antennas can be sited to give a synthesised beam whose width may be set to within about one percent of any desired value in the appropriate range. The sidelobe levels in snapshot mode and the ratio of longest instantaneous baseline to shortest are investigated and found to improve as the ratio a/b is increased; for values of the ratio greater than 4 these properties are excellent, and better than those of rings or other configurations that have been considered for the MMA.


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Last modified: 09 December, 1999

kweather@nrao.edu