© Yogesh Maan and Roy Smits
The initial set of hardware, firmware and software in ARTS, for the pulsar timing module, has recently been installed at the WSRT site. After a number of commissioning steps to test and iron out wrinkles in the various required processing steps, we saw a pulse profile come through on Wednesday 11 August at 12:37:00 CEST and we proclaimed first light!
The first image captures the moment that ARTS team members Daniel, Roy, Yogesh and Apertif commissioning engineer Boudewijn witnessed this great milestone -- the folded profile of a 3-minute, 18.75-MHz-bandwidth observation of pulsar B0329+54, the go-to commissioning pulsar in the Northern Sky. We used only the central Apertif dipole elements from 3 WSRT dishes in this first and most basic step and the signal to noise ratio was in the expected range.
The second image shows an even better profile of a 15-minute observation, revealing the characteristic components of this bright pulsar.
The final image shows the first hardware component of ARTS, called ARTS-0, which has the high precision pulsar timing pipeline implemented on it. This machine is capable of performing real-time coherent dedispersion of radio pulsars of the full 300 MHz (twice the bandwidth of the pre-upgrade WSRT), as well as storing up to 30 hours of raw voltages. That will allow for the continuation of the high-precision pulsar timing programme. By expanding on the pre-upgrade timing baseline, WSRT will contribute to projects like neutron-star mass measurements, studies of binary pulsar evolution and, eventually, gravitational wave detection with a pulsar timing array in the nanohertz regime.