Calibration and Imaging for the next generation of radio synthesis telescopes

The next big improvements in scientific capability in radio astronomy are expected to come from large increases in sensitivity and field of view, leading to telescopes that are ideally suited to surveying the radio sky. For the last fifteen years radio astronomers around the world have been competing and collaborating to come up with designs for a Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will be roughly fifty times more sensitive than the Very Large Array and three orders of magnitude faster at surveying. The challenge of building such a telescope at a relatively affordable cost (1 Billion Euros) has led to a number of innovative designs. The common element of the leading designs is an increasing reliance on digital technology for beam forming. In this paper, I review the two main areas of innovation, aperture arrays and phased array feeds, and describe how these solve some problems but raise others, particularly for calibration and imaging.