Description: We propose to design a general purpose reconfigurable wide bandwidth spectrometer for use in NASA's passive microwave missions, deep space network and radio astronomy. In Phase I, we will design and build a low power, low cost real time FPGA based spectrometer board that will analyze a 3 GHz bandwidth signal with 16,384 channels. Utilizing 3 Gsample/sec 8 bit ADC's and Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA's, the proposed spectrometer can also be configured to analyze a pair of signals with 1.5 GHz bandwidth each, or four signals of 750 MHz bandwidth each. A Polyphase Filter Bank (PFB) will be implemented instead of a large FFT, because the PFB has excellent out of band rejection ($> 80$ dB), preventing strong RFI from contaminating adjacent bands. In Phase II, we will space qualify the spectrometer, provide significantly higher bandwidth capabilities, and add high speed output, and consider an ASIC implementation for lower-power space-based applications. Techne instrumentation has flown on Rosetta, PERSI, and several soundong rockets.

Benefits: Potential NASA Commercial Applications: We will make the Phase I low cost spectrometer available to the radio astronomy community for a wide variety of applications, including multibeam spectroscopy (eg: HEAT, MAS), holography, IR and sub-mm heterodyne spectroscopy, CMB resonating bolometer experiments, and small educational radio telescopes at high schools and universities. The phase II spectrometer with 10GBe/infiniband outputs can be used for beam forming, pulsar timing and searching, reionization experiments, adaptive RFI mitigation, very long base line interferometry (Mark 5C VLBI for geodesy and astronony), and large imaging correlators such as those needed for SKA, ATA, LOFAR, LWA, PAST and transient searches.