Ramesh Bhat

Sammy McSweeney

Nick Swainston

Susmita Sett

Ryan Shannon

Mengyao Xue

Marcin Sokolowski

Gayatri Aniruddha

Ian Morrison

Ramesh’s update:

• No change in sky coverage plot

• MWA configuration change:

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  • Change (to extended configuration) was planned for early March (as of recent emails)

  • However, due to various circumstances, configuration change will be starting imminently

  • Will have to wait for details before we can make solid plans for remaining SMART observations

  • However, new system has smaller turnaround time for data throughput, so more observations can be packed into a smaller number of days (which may be crucial for strategising the remaining observations).

• Search sensitivity

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  • Plot shown (intended for SMART survey description paper, Bhat et al in prep) showing sensitivity as a function of DM.

  • Tsys is worse by factor of ~2 in Galactic plane compared to elsewhere.

  • Scattering can significantly reduce sensitivity

  • SMART still 3-5 times more sensitive than 70-cm survey (for long period pulsars)

  • Smearing time. Turns out that DM steps used for shallow pass are big enough to dominate smearing time. This will have to inform deep shallow.

• Referee report received for McSweeney et al. (submitted) last week.

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  • (Sam will report more later in the meeting)

• PSR #3

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  • Current position good to ~1-2 arcminutes

  • Not seen in TGSS and 70cm

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    • Sensitive down to 4mJy

    • Same frequency as SMART

    • Indicative S_150 ~ 10-15 mJy, spectral index < -1.8

    • Cycle 42 GMRT proposal due in 48 hours

• Positive response for ASTAC (2022A) proposal

• Personnel:

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  • Nick switching to part time – he got a job at CIC! (Congrats!)

  • Garvit will be starting >= March

  • Brad Meyers coming back in Sem 2

• Discussion:

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  • RS: Any re-observations (or archival obs) of PSR #3?

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    • NS: No, it’s in a historically less frequently sampled field.

Sammy’s update:

• MWAX commissioning data progress reported here:

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  • https://wiki.mwatelescope.org/pages/viewpage.action?spaceKey=MP&title=MWAX+VCS+Commissioning

• New VCSBeam documentation (still a work in progress) published here:

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  • https://github.com/CIRA-Pulsars-and-Transients-Group/vcsbeam

• MWAX concern:

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  • Some structure seen in frequency hints at potential problems

  • Currently with MWAX data, edge channels are ALWAYS flagged

Nick’s update:

• At 39/51 first pass shallow search processing complete

• Database webapp has lots of nice new features, but current set of bugs means nothing that can be shown at today’s meeting (stay tuned!)

• SM: How many of the 39 (out of 51) have been ranked?

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  • NS: Not many. Maybe ~6 (by humans), but ~30 (by ML)

Sammy’s 2nd update:

• Second paper referee report arrived

• Generally positive, can probably turn around revision in a few weeks (depending on Sammy’s time management!)

Ramesh’s survey paper update:

• >⅓ of paper has draft text

• Quick overview of some figures in various stages of completion

• Not yet ripe enough to share Overleaf more broadly, but is coming along

• Discussion on what data products can be made available to public – more discussion later

• Ways to improve Table 1 (Known pulsars detected in SMART survey)

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  • Include offsets from true positions

  • Include some spectral index info