While the plan was for four researchers to visit for 12 days, in the actual situation the best strategy was to send two researchers for an extended period of time, while staying within the budget of the task. Thus, PhD student Mohamed Nedal visited ASTRON between 17.05 and 29.06.2022 (with a break for attendance of a conference between 22-27.05.2022), and Dr. Peijin Zhang visited ASTRON between 08.06 and 13.07.2022. The two researchers were hosted by Dr. Pietro Zucca, with whom they collaborated on processing and analysis of solar and heliospheric radio observations from LOFAR. Below we outline the work performed and results obtained.
During this visit, Dr. Peijin Zhang accomplished 3 tasks: (1) Developing an RFI flagger algorithm for the solar and space weather in collaborating with radio astronomy expert Dr. Andre Offringa; (2) Making progress on the calibration of the LOFAR for solar dynamic spectra; (3) Analyzing a specific event observed with LOFAR: a Type II radio burst showing multilane structure, which occurred on May 19, 2022.
No less than three research projects were started during this very fruitful extended visit to ASTRON, which have resulted in manuscripts being submitted for publication. The IANAO researchers worked on dynamic spectrum and imaging observations of solar burst activity, on automated detection of bursts, as well as on techniques of flagging radio frequency interference. This work allowed for transfer of expertise processing and analyzing LOFAR data to IANAO.
