Roy Smits Email & Phone Number

Hoogeveen, Dr, Nl

Hoogeveen

Meppel

Development of web-applications and mathematical implementations.

Astron, Dwingeloo, The Netherlands

The WSRT (Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope) is undergoing an upgrade to significantly improve its FoV (field-of-view) by a factor of 37. Along with this upgrade an ERC-grant has been awarded to build a state of the art backend (ARTS: Apertif Radio Transient System) that allows detection and study of transients within the entire FoV .I have worked to construct the hardware and software specifications for this backend related to pulsar timing and have developed the full software pipeline to allow pulsar timing to take advantage of the new receivers.

Astron, Dwingeloo, The Netherlands

As an astronomer at ASTRON and affiliated with the University of Manchester, I have been involved in LEAP (the Large European Array for Pulsars). This prestigious ERC-funded project undertakes the challenge to combine the raw voltages from 5 major European telescopes into a single tied-array beam, fully polarization calibrated, for the purpose of high-precision pulsar timing. The significant increase in sensitivity provides a boost in the global efforts to detect gravitational waves via the pulsar radio signals.Using a combination of C, C++, python and shell-scripting, I have developed a software pipeline that allows the raw voltages from all telescopes to be added coherently, apply polarization calibration, rfi filtering and extract the time-of-arrival from the folded average pulsar profile.Along with this effort, I have set up the hardware and performed the observations related to the WSRT (Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope) and I have trained a group of young astronomers to utilize the software pipeline.

My task is to perform a study to the scientific outcome when using the SKA (Square Kilometer Array) for pulsar observations. The SKA is the most prestigious radio telescope ever proposed. If funded, it will consist of thousands of dishes along with a new receiving technique called Aperture Array. The total collective area will be close to one square kilometer and the maximum baseline (distance between the furthest dishes) will be 3000 kilometers. In it's current timeschedule, it will be build somewhere around 2020. The outcome of my results will affect the exact design of the SKA.

Temporary position as Labview programmer to help automize the process of testing new IC's.