  Radio-astronomical observations are increasingly corrupted by RF
interference, and online detection and filtering algorithms are becoming
essential. To facilitate the introduction of such techniques into radio
astronomy, we formulate the astronomical problem in an array signal processing
language, and give an introduction to some elementary algorithms from that
field. We consider two topics in detail: interference detection by rank
estimation of short-term covariance matrices, and spatial filtering by subspace
estimation and projection. We discuss experimental data collected at the
Westerbork radio telescope, and illustrate the effectiveness of the space-time
detection and blanking process on the recovery of a 3C48 absorption line in the
presence of GSM mobile telephony interference.
