Major LOFAR upgrade approved

BY MISCHA BRENDEL AND WIM VAN CAPPELLEN (ASTRON)

The board of the International LOFAR Telescope has approved the purchase of upgraded hardware for all 52 stations of the pan-European telescope, plus two additional stations, and spare parts.

The upgrade, known as LOFAR2.0, has seen contracts with a total value of €10m awarded to the Dutch companies Neways¹, Major Electronics², Variass³, and Batenburg Industriële Elektronica⁴.

LOFAR has thousands of antennas spread across 10 partner countries, with the core of its stations in the Netherlands. The new investment will mean it is possible to use all the LOFAR antennas – high and low band – together for the first time.

“The simultaneous low- and high-band observing provides a full view over four octaves of radio frequencies; plus, the telescope’s field-of-view will also increase. This enables both wide-area and ultra-deep surveys of the low-frequency sky, which aim to detect, for example, star-planet interactions, the cosmic web between galaxies, and galaxies in formation during the early history of the Universe,” says ASTRON’s Prof. Jason Hessels.

“What excites me most are the excellent prospects for discovering something unexpected and unpredicted because we will be charting the sky as never before possible.”

Production and delivery of the modules is expected in 2024.

¹ Neways will manufacture the UniBoard2 digital processing boards that enable simultaneous observations with the low band and high band antennas.

² Major Electronics will produce the cabinet clock distribution module, LOFAR mid-plane board and the antenna processing subrack power unit module.

³ Variass will manufacture the receiver modules (RCU2) for the telescope, 6,000 pieces in total. These amplify the antenna signals and allow astronomers to select specific frequency ranges. After the analogue signal amplification and filtering, the signal is digitised by the analogue-to-digital converter and is sent to the Uniboard2 for further signal processing via the LMP Module. Each RCU2 module handles three antenna signals individually.

⁴ Batenburg Industriële Elektronica is responsible for the manufacturing of more than 200 clock distribution modules, which distribute the highly accurate and stable station clock to the various modules inside the station sub-rack.