Statistical performance of reference antenna based spatial RFI mitigation for radio astronomy

Radio Frequency Interference is an important challenge for radio astronomy. Interference mitigation can be applied in the time, frequency and spatial domains. The spatial approach is particularly of interest with next generation radio telescopes as it is able to provide uncorrupted time-frequency data. This paper analyzes the performance of spatial interference mitigation based on an orthogonal projector and a reference antenna. The performance of the technique, given in term of attenuation in the direction of the RFI, appears to depend on the data model and system parameters. This derived statistical equation highlights this dependence and is of interest of radio telescope designers.