Capabilities and Specifications
VLA Capabilities and Specifications
After the conclusion of the EVLA project, the VLA currently provides (or will soon provide) the following capabilities:
- Sensitivity: Continuum sensitivity improvement over the old VLA by factors of 5 to 20: point-source sensitivity after one hour between 2 and 6 μJy (between 1 and 50 GHz, dependent on band).
- Frequency Accessibility: Operation at any frequency between 1.0 and 50 GHz, with up to 8 GHz bandwidth per polarization, 64 independently tunable sub-band pairs, each providing full polarization capabilities.
- Spectral Capability: A minimum of 16,384 and a maximum of 4,194,304 channels, adjustable frequency resolution between 2 MHz and 0.2 Hz, and extensive capabilities to allocate correlator resources.
- Imaging Capability: Spatial dynamic range greater than 106, frequency dynamic range greater than 105, with noise-limited, full-field imaging in all Stokes parameters.
- Operations: Dynamic scheduling, based on weather, array configuration, and science requirements. "Default" images automatically produced, with all data products archived.
