SKA sensitivity calculators

We are excited to announce the release of the SKA Low and Mid sensitivity calculators. This version of the calculators includes continuum, spectral calculations (including zoom modes), and Pulsar Search (PSS) modes, and we invite the community to use them and provide feedback while we implement the full suite of SKA observing modes. As we strive for high levels of usability and accessibility, we are especially keen to hear feedback on your experiences in these areas.

The SKA sensitivity calculators enable astronomers to estimate the theoretical sensitivity for all supported observing modes with the SKA-Low and SKA-Mid telescopes. In the current release, the calculators support three observing modes: Continuum, zoom/spectral line imaging modes and the pulsar search (PSS) tied-array beamformed mode. For imaging observing modes, the calculators can also estimate the synthesized beam sizes for specific subarray configurations and visibility weighting schemes.

Since SKA-Low is an aperture array with electronic beamforming, the telescope's sensitivity depends on the pointing direction and varies as the source moves across the station beam. The SKA-Low sensitivity calculator takes the direction-, LST-, and frequency-dependent effects into account following the procedure described in Sokolowski et al. (2022).

Both calculators can be accessed using this common link. The web interface loads by default with the SKA-Low calculator. You can switch between the two telescopes using the telescope toggle button near the top-right corner of the web interface. The user guides can be accessed using these links: Low calculator user guide and Mid calculator user guide.

We will normally host the calculator user guides on the SKAO website. However, for a few initial releases, we make it public as a Google document to encourage inline comments from the wider community.

We encourage feedback from the SKA users' community, ideally addressed to sciops@skao.int.

Última modificação em 28 May 2025