MRI-R2: Development of Owens Valley Solar Array to a Community Facility

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The Pricipal Investigator's (PI's) team will develop new and improved instrumentation and infrastructure for the existing Owens Valley Solar Array (OVSA), and thereby create a major university-based facility serving a broad scientific community. The team will upgrade OVSA from its current complement of 7 antennas to a total of 15, with the addition of 8 new antennas. They will also replace existing OVSA control systems, wiring, and signal processing systems with modern, more capable, and more reliable electronics using new technologies. The project will result in a world-class facility for scientific research at microwave radio frequencies, focused on space weather physics and solar astronomy. Solar radio emission is very sensitive to the physics of space weather processes. The enhanced OVSA facility will provide key diagnostic observations of the magnetic and thermal structure of the solar atmosphere, the release of magnetic energy in the corona, and the space weather consequences of solar activity. This effort will provide the scientific community with new and powerful tools for radio astronomy in general, as well as a unique combination of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution to exploit radio diagnostics of the Sun beyond what has previously been possible. The improved facility will support the university community by providing open data access and software tools for radio data analysis, and by exploiting data sets and analysis techniques used in on-going solar research in non-radio wavelength bands. The PI's team will invoke a rich heritage of radar design work to accomplish a wide range of science objectives that has been thoroughly vetted by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. The project will provide jobs to US small industry and to the local economy, and will offer technical training and scientific research experience for students, as well as young scientists and engineers. This development effort will provide trainees with much-needed instrumental expertise in the fields of broadband radio frequency engineering, high-speed digital electronics and signal processing, and high performance computing. The project includes well-integrated education and training plans for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as for post-doctoral researchers and entry-level engineers. The instrumentation and software developed by this project will provide new tools for classroom use, and will enlarge the base of researchers who will be able to apply interferometric imaging techniques and radio emission physics to studying key problems in solar physics, space weather physics, and astrophysics. The PI expects that new discoveries enabled by the new OVSA facility will help us improve the reliability of our technological systems on Earth and in space.