MeerKAT—The South African Array With Composite Dishes and Wide-Band Single Pixel Feeds

Abstract

The MeerKAT is a precursor for the ldquosmall dish plus single-pixel wide-band feedrdquo scenario for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The current goal specification is for an array of 80 12-m dishes operating over a continuous frequency range of 0.7-10 GHz, thus the individual receptors match the SKA draft specification for midband dishes. The proposed array configuration is centrally concentrated with 70% of the collecting area within a 700-m-diameter circle and the remaining 30% extending out to baselines of 10 km. The site for MeerKAT lies within a radio quiet reserve established in the remote and Northern Cape province of South Africa. The technologies and techniques that MeerKAT will develop and evaluate include wide-bandwidth feeds, low-cost dish antennas, instrumentation for high dynamic range observations, packet-switched array processing architectures, shielding of component radio-frequency interference (RFI), mitigation of external RFI, and low-cost and reliable remote telescope operation.