1175th General Monthly Meeting
The SKAMP Project - A Telescope Reborn to Look Back in Time
Professor Anne Green
Head, School of Physics
University of Sydney
Date: Wednesday, 7th October, 2009
Time: 6:30 for 7:00 pm
Venue: Conference Room 1, Darlington Centre, City Road
ABSTRACT
For more than 40 years the University of Sydney has operated the Molonglo Observatory. Recently, the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope completed a detailed imaging survey of the southern sky at a frequency of 843 MHz. What next? We are undertaking a complete renewal of the signal pathway as part of Australia's contribution to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, a powerful new radio telescope. Our project is the SKA Molonglo Prototype (SKAMP), which will be a new low frequency spectrometer with wide-field imaging and polarization capability. This talk will describe the project and how it builds on the previous telescope and its science achievements. Two of the key science goals to be undertaken initially will be a survey of red-shifted neutral hydrogen gas and a study of the transient radio sky. With the subsequent polarization capability, we will map the magnetic field structure of our Galaxy and explore cosmic magnetism.
The speakers's presentation can be found here: Anne Green's Talk (3.6 MB PDF).
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Professor Anne Green is a radio astronomer whose main research focus is the study of the structure and ecology of our Milky Way Galaxy with particular interest in supernova remnants, the relics of exploded stars. She was Director of the Molonglo Observatory for ten years and is now Head of the School of Physics and Director of the Science Foundation for Physics within the University of Sydney, the first woman to hold these posiitons. Professor Green is a graduate of both Melbourne and Sydney Universities and was the first female PhD graduate in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. She held an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut for Radioastronomie in Bonn, Germany, before retiring from academia to travel Europe, live in Belgium and Switzerland and have two children. After a return to Sydney and fifteen years away from astronomy, she resumed her research career. She is now leader of the SKA Molonglo Prototype (SKAMP) project, which is prototyping technology and undertaking science projects as a forerunner to an amazing new telescope for the future called the Square Kilometre Array. Professor Green is also the Chair of the International Astronomical Union Working Group whose goal is to improve the status of women in astronomy.