CASPER: Digital Instrumentation for Radio Astronomy

天文信号处理和电子研究合作组织（CASPER）是一个由天文学家、物理学家、工程师和计算机科学家组成的国际团体。该合作开发并维护了一系列主要用于射电天文学研究的工具。这包括开源硬件、软件、库和仪器设计。这些工具可以用作模板，使科学家能够以具有成本效益和及时的方式创建他们需要的工具来实现他们的科学目标。CASPER的硬件和软件被用于世界各地天文台的100多台仪器。仪器包括从本科教学实验室的小型实验到大型、先进的望远镜设备。例如，CASPER工具被用作事件视界望远镜的一部分，它产生了我们银河系中心黑洞的第一张图像。它们还可以用来推动大脑研究、基因组学、雷达应用、中子和磁场成像的进步。CASPER的研究对射电天文信号处理仪器的开发成本和时间尺度产生了积极的影响。该项目将利用CASPER社区过去的工作，结合超级计算行业的当前发展，为经济有效地建造下一代天文仪器提供基础设施。这包括新的宽带光谱仪和瞬态探测机，大型天线阵列的相关器和毫米波相机。使用CASPER技术建造仪器的低入门成本使许多学生和早期职业科学家能够使用在天文台部署的相同设备和工具获得仪器设计经验。在这个项目中进行的新研究将帮助天文台和研究小组设计仪器，以实现光谱成像（相关）、波束形成、RFI缓解、脉冲星搜索和定时、快速射电暴搜索、SETI、VLBI和宽带高分辨率光谱。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) is an international community of astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists. The collaboration develops and maintains a collection of tools primarily used for radio astronomy research. This includes open-source hardware, software, libraries, and instrument designs. These tools can be used as templates to enable researchers to create the instruments they need to achieve their science goals in a cost effective and timely manner. CASPER hardware and software is used in over 100 instruments at astronomy observatories around the world. Instruments include everything from small experiments in undergraduate teaching labs to large, advanced telescope facilities. CASPER tools were used, for example, as part of the Event Horizon Telescope that produced the first images of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. They can also be used to drive advances in brain research, genomics, radar applications, and neutron and magnetic field imaging.CASPER research has positively impacted the cost and time scale for development of radio astronomy signal processing instrumentation. This project will leverage the past work of the CASPER community, in tandem with current developments in the super-computing industry, to provide the infrastructure to cost effectively build the next generation of astronomical instrumentation. This includes new wide-band spectrometers and transient-detection machines, correlators for large antenna arrays, and millimeter wave cameras. The low cost-of-entry associated with building instruments with CASPER technologies has allowed many students and early career scientists to gain instrument design experience using the same equipment and tools that are deployed at observatories. The new research to be undertaken in this project will assist in instrument designs for observatories and research groups to enable spectral imaging (correlation), beamforming, RFI mitigation, pulsar searching and timing, fast radio burst searching, SETI, VLBI, and wideband high-resolution spectroscopy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.