Jay Banyer, Tara Murphy, the VAST Collaboration
The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a next generation radio telescope
currently under construction in Western Australia. The fast survey speed and
wide field of view make it an ideal instrument for blind transients searches.
The ASKAP Variable and Slow Transients (VAST) survey is a one of the major
science programs planned for ASKAP. The scientific goals of VAST include the
detection and characterisation of a wide range of transient and variable
phenomena, from gamma-ray burst afterglows to extreme scattering events, on
timescales of 5 seconds or longer.
We describe the data and processing challenges involved in running the VAST
real-time transient detection pipeline. ASKAP will produce 2.5 GB of visibility
data per second, transformed into one 8GB image cube every 5 seconds. Each cube
will contain approximately twenty 100 megapixel images with 100s of radio
sources detected in each epoch. The VAST pipeline will measure and monitor all
of these sources, detect variables and transients and generate alerts using the
VOEvent framework.
The goal of the VAST Design Study is to develop a prototype pipeline to
establish and demonstrate the functionality of the final ASKAP pipeline. We
give an overview of the prototype pipeline's functionality, technical
implementation and current status.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.3130
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