Australian SKA Pathfinder: A High-Dynamic Range Wide-Field of View Survey Telescope Featuring high-speed sky coverage with a large field of view, the first priority for this telescope will be better understanding of galaxy formation and evolution

The Australia SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a new telescope under development as a world-class high-dynamic- range wide-field-of-view survey instrument. It will utilize focal plane phased array feeds on the 36 12-m antennas that will compose the array. The large amounts of data present a huge computing challenge, and ASKAP will store data products in an archive after near real-time pipeline processing. This powerful instrument will be deployed at a new radio-quiet observatory, the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the midwest region of Western Australia, to enable sensitive surveys of the entire sky to address some of the big questions in contem- porary physics. As a pathfinder for the SKA, ASKAP will demonstrate field of view enhancement and computing/ processing technology as well as the operation of a large-scale radio array in a remote and radio-quiet region of Australia.