A Low frequency Southern Sky Survey Using the Mauritius Radio Telescope

Abstract

The Mauritius Radio Telescope (MRT) is a Fourier synthesis instrument which has been built to fill the gap in the availability of deep sky surveys at low radio frequencies in the southern hemisphere. It is situated in the north-east of Mauritius at a southern latitude of 20°.14 and an eastern longitude of 57°.73. The aim of the survey with the MRT is to contribute to the database of southern sky sources in the declination range −70° ≤ δ ≤ −10°, covering the entire 24 hours of right ascension, with a resolution of 4' × 4'.6sec(δ + 20.14°) and a point source sensitivity of 200 mJy (3σ level) at 151.5 MHz.MRT is a T-shaped non-coplanar array consisting of a 2048 m long East-West arm and a 880 m long South arm. In the East-West arm 1024 fixed helices are arranged in 32 groups and in the South arm 16 trolleys, with four helices on each, which move on a rail are used. A 512 channel, 2-bit 3-level complex correlation receiver is used to measure the visibility function. At least 60 days of observing are required for obtaining the visibilities up to the 880 m spacing. The calibrated visibilities are transformed taking care of the non-coplanarity of the array to produce an image of the area of the sky under observation.This paper will describe the telescope, the observations carried out so far, a few interesting aspects of imaging with this non-coplanar array and present results of a low resolution survey (13' × 18') covering roughly 12 hours of right ascension, and also present an image with a resolution of 4' × 4'.6sec(δ + 20.14°) made using the telescope.