Abstract

Poster - Splinter General   (Synagoge - Kuppelsaal / virtual plenum)

SKAMPI: An eye on the Southern hemisphere

Ferdinand Jünemann, Aritra Basu, Hans-Rainer Klöckner, Michael Kramer, Gundolf Wieching, Tobias Winchen
DZA, MPIfR, TLS Tautenburg

The SKAMPI telescope, designed and developed by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), Bonn, is the first SKA-Mid prototype dish, located near the MeerKAT site in South Africa. Thanks to the state-of-the-art, flexible backend design, and highly automatized operation, SKAMPI supports single-dish and VLBI modes. Equipped with a cryogenic S-Band receiver covering 1.75 to 3.5 GHz, SKAMPI is already providing sensitive measurements of the Milky Way's emission in S-band. In this poster, we will present the capabilities of SKAMPI, its observational characteristics, and its impact as a fast, full polarization survey machine for the Southern sky. In particular, SKAMPI's polarization survey will be key to mapping the polarized Galactic synchrotron emission and the imprint it leaves on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This poster presents the current status of the Southern-sky survey, and preliminary fringes obtained in VLBI mode. Although SKAMPI is only 15-m in diameter, its wide bandwidth will play a transformative role in advancing our knowledge of the polarized emission of the Milky Way, and in testing new technologies.