The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview

The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview

The Murchison Widefield Array is a dipole-based aperture array synthesis telescope designed to operate in the 80-300 MHz frequency range. It is capable of a wide range of science investigations but is initially focused on three key science projects: detection and characterization of three dimensiona...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lonsdale, Colin, Cappallo, Roger, Morales, Miguel, Briggs, Frank, Benkevitch, Leonid, Bowman, Judd, Bunton, John, Burns, Steven, Corey, Brian, DeSouza, Ludi, Doeleman, Sheperd, Derome, Mark, Deshpande, Avinash, Gopala, Modavanatt, Greenhill, Lincoln, Herne, David, Hewitt, Jacqueline, Kamini, P., Kasper, Justin, Kincaid, Barton, Kocz, Jonathon, Kowald, Errol, Kratzenberg, Eric, Kumar, Deepak, Lynch, Mervyn, Madhavi, S., Matejek, Michael, Mitchell, Daniel, Morgan, Edward, Oberoi, Divya, Ord, Steven, Pathikulangara, Joseph, Prabu, T., Rogers, Alan, Roshi, Anish, Saleh, Joseph, Sault, Robert, Shankar, N. Udaya, Srivani, K., Stevens, Jamie, Tingay, Steven, Vaccarella, Annino, Waterson, Mark, Wayth, Randall, Webster, Rachel, Whitney, Alan, Williams, Andrew, Williams, Christopher
Format: Journal Article
Published: IEEE 2009
Subjects:
ionosphere
Antenna array
calibration
imaging
astronomy
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/46854
Description
Summary:The Murchison Widefield Array is a dipole-based aperture array synthesis telescope designed to operate in the 80-300 MHz frequency range. It is capable of a wide range of science investigations but is initially focused on three key science projects: detection and characterization of three dimensional brightness temperature fluctuations in the 21 cmline of neutral hydrogen during the epoch of reionization (EoR) at red shifts from six to ten; solar imaging and remote sensing of the inner heliosphere via propagation effects on signals from distant background sources; and high-sensitivity exploration ofthe variable radio sky. The array design features 8192 dualpolarization broadband active dipoles, arranged into 512 Btiles, comprising 16 dipoles each. The tiles are quasi-randomly distributed over an aperture 1.5 km in diameter, with a small number of outliers extending to 3 km. All tile-tile baselines are correlated in custom field-programmable gate array based hardware, yielding a Nyquist-sampled instantaneous monochromaticuv coverage and unprecedented point spread function quality. The correlated data are calibrated in real time using novel position-dependent self-calibration algorithms. The array is located in the Murchison region of outback Western Australia. This region is characterized by extremely low population density and a superbly radio-quiet environment, allowing full exploitation of the instrumental capabilities.

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