Digital Instrumentation for the Radio Astronomy Community
Abstract
Time-to-science is an important figure of merit for digital instrumentation serving the astronomical community. A digital signal processing (DSP) community is forming that uses shared hardware development, signal processing libraries, and instrument architectures to reduce development time of digital instrumentation and to improve time-to-science for a wide variety of projects. We suggest prioritizing technological development supporting the needs of this nascent DSP community. After outlining several instrument classes that are relying on digital instrumentation development to achieve new science objectives, we identify key areas where technologies pertaining to interoperability and processing flexibility will reduce the time, risk, and cost of developing the digital instrumentation for radio astronomy. These areas represent focus points where support of general-purpose, open-source development for a DSP community should be prioritized in the next decade. Contributors to such technological development may be centers of support for this DSP community, science groups that contribute general-purpose DSP solutions as part of their own instrumentation needs, or engineering groups engaging in research that may be applied to next-generation DSP instrumentation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0904.1181,
title = {Digital Instrumentation for the Radio Astronomy Community},
author = {Aaron Parsons and Dan Werthimer and Donald Backer and Tim Bastian and Geoffrey Bower and Walter Brisken and Henry Chen and Adam Deller and Terry Filiba and Dale Gary and Lincoln Greenhill and David Hawkins and Glenn Jones and Glen Langston and Joseph Lazio and Joeri van Leeuwen and Daniel Mitchell and Jason Manley and Andrew Siemion and Hayden Kwok-Hay So and Alan Whitney and Dave Woody and Melvyn Wright and Kristian Zarb-Adami},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0904.1181},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
11 pages, 4 figures, Astro2010 Decadal Survey White Paper in TEC: Technology Development