Designing Antennas for Large N Aperture Arrays: The SKA and HERA Cases

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) [1] and the Hydrogen Epoch of Re-ionization Array (HERA) [2] are two of the most prominent, technically advanced large N aperture arrays as well as ambitious radio astronomy projects in development today. These two projects will count with a large number of aperture antennas (512 stations with 256 antenna elements each in the case of the SKA1-LOW instrument and ∼350 14-m dish antennas in the case of HERA). SKA1-LOW (the low-frequency instrument of SKA) and HERA have several common aspects as well as differences in both their scientific aims and its design goals and requirements, and so do their array antennas.