EARS: Mitigating Ultra-Faint Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) to Enable Radio Cosmology

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Radio cosmology is one of the major goals of the US radio astronomy community and has the potential to reveal the birth of the Universe's first stars, measure Dark Energy, and reveal the history of galaxy formation. The signal from the distant universe is extraordinarily faint, a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a Watt. The important signals are found in the commercial broadcast bands. In comparison reflections of TV and radio transmissions off the moon is quite bright. This research will find and remove the very faintest man-made radio interference from sources such as space junk reflections and over-the-horizon atmospheric refraction (inverse mirages). In addition, this research will develop and release open source software to help remove ultra-faint Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) at any radio telescope around the world. This grant will also expand the University of Washington Community College Transfer Program that uses undergraduate research to help community college students transfer to four year universities and major in physics or engineering, naturally increasing the gender balance and diversity of these STEM fields. Radio Cosmology is the grand challenge of modern radio astronomy "Epoch of Reionization" observations, which were the goal of the highest priority mid-scale project identified by the Radio, Millimeter, and Submillimeter Panel of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey. There has been great progress in developing the instruments and analysis techniques needed to measure these extraordinarily faint signals from the distant universe. The investigators will develop the tools for identifying and removing ultra-faint RFI, demonstrate the new techniques on Epoch of Reionization data, and freely release the code to the astronomical community. As a part of this proposal, the investigators will build on the very successful Community College Transfer Program developed by one of the investigators, expanding it to include electrical engineering as well as physics students. They will recruit 4 students a year to focus on the performance of the antenna and proposed digital upgrades. The investigators will install an antenna and have undergraduate students investigate non-linear interactions between the hardware, digital system and RFI.