| Description: | For a few years now, we have been battling with Focal Plane Arrays (FPAs) to see whether they could be useful for the WSRT. They hold great promise, because if we can really make them to work, the WSRT can image much larger regions of the sky in one go, instead of the small patches we can do now. With Apertif, the FPA system for the WSRT, it will take only a few years to image the entire sky. With the current WSRT, it would take a century.
Today and tomorrow (25 & 26 Aug) we reach an important milestone: the Preliminary Design Review of the FPA system for Apertif. Based on all the experiments we have done, we are now very confident that we know how to actually build Apertif in such a way that it indeed fulfills the desires of the astronomers. But to be sure, the next two days experts from outside and inside Astron will review all the results and check that what we are doing here at Astron indeed makes as much sense as we think it does. |
