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D.E. Gary (NJIT), G.J. Hurford (UC Berkeley)
The Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) Solar Array is a solar-dedicated radio imaging instrument that obtains flare and active region data in the range 1-18 GHz. The array is currently undergoing extensive software and hardware upgrades, to be completed by mid-2000 -- in time for the launch of the HESSI spacecraft. The hardware improvements include adding two antennas to the 5 existing ones, bringing the number of antennas to 7 and the number of baselines to 21. This addition will improve the image quality and double the east-west spatial resolution, to 5" at 10 GHz.
Along with the hardware improvements, the computer control and data systems are being completely revamped to modernize the data handling and make the data available and useful to outside users on a daily basis. Certain standard data products (e.g. calibrated total power spectra of flares), will be available by this summer, via web server, for open use by the solar community. Complete interferometry data will be available by the time of the HESSI launch, in self-contained data files that can be analyzed using freely-available, user-friendly IDL widget-driven software. It is planned to model the analysis software after the HESSI analysis software, so that those who have mastered the use of the HESSI software will be able to use the OVRO software without difficulty. This is possible since the HESSI and OVRO data are parallel in many ways. Both obtain spatial data in the form of time profiles of spatial fourier components, at many spectral points. Both pertain to emission from both high-energy and thermal electrons in the corona. The two data-sets are highly complementary, and it is expected that the OVRO data will be of great interest to many researchers working on HESSI data. Ultimately, the full OVRO data will be archived at the HESSI European Data Center (HEDC).
The OVRO Solar Array is supported through NSF grants AST-9796238 and ATM-9796213, and NASA grant NAG5-6831 to New Jersey Institute of Technology.
If the author provided an email address or URL for general inquiries,
it is as follows:
http://solar.njit.edu/radio.html