Radio Camera Initiative

The Radio Camera Initiative (RCI) is an initiative to design and produce back end instruments for radio-astronomy interferometry, essentially to push the technology to handle a very large number of baselines, for arrays such as DSA-2000 and OVRO-LWA. This requires a lot of computation, a good bit of which must be handled in real time due to the very large amount of raw data to be processed. The processing is to include functions equivalent to aperture synthesis and to the CLEAN algorithm. The word camera reflects that fact that the purpose is to allow large low-to-mid frequency radio telescope arrays is to produce images much like ALMA produces images at millimeter wavelengths (and like ordinary optical telescopes produce).