Real-Time RFI Mitigation in Pulsar Observations

International audienceAs the use of wireless technology has increased around the world, RadioFrequency Interference (RFI) has become more and more of a problem forradio astronomers. Preventative measures exist to limit the presence ofRFI, and programs exist to remove it from saved data, but the routineuse of algorithms to detect and remove RFI as an observation isoccurring is much less common. Such a method would be incredibly usefulfor observations in which the data must undergo several rounds ofprocessing before being saved, as in pulsar timing studies. Strategiesfor real-time mitigation have been discussed and tested with simulateddata (Buch et al., 2016), but ideally the results of any approach wouldbe validated by a detailed comparison of the final data products - forpulsar timing, the variance in the pulse times of arrival (TOAs) - withand without mitigation applied. The goal of this project is to developan RFI mitigation approach based on the previously suggested strategiesand test this program on actual data from the observation of pulsarJ1713+0747. We use a Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) filter to identifyinterference in the observation and replace the compromised data withrandom Gaussian noise to match a characteristic radio signal from space.In order to verify our results, we analyze the pulsar?s TOAs obtainedboth from the mitigated data and from the unmitigated data processedthrough offline RFI removal software. Comparing the two, our preliminaryfindings indicate that our program is able to improve the quality oftiming results from the observation. <P /&gt