The Murchison Widefield Array: The Square Kilometre Array Precursor at Low Radio Frequencies

The Murchison Widefield Array: The Square Kilometre Array Precursor at Low Radio Frequencies

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is one of three Square Kilometre Array Precursor telescopes and is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the Murchison Shire of the mid-west of Western Australia, a location chosen for its extremely low levels of radio frequency interference. The...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tingay, Steven, Emrich, David, Ord, Stephen, Booler, Tom, Crosse, Brian, Wayth, Randall, Tremblay, Steven, Pallot, Dave, Colegate, Timothy, Kudryavtseva, Nadia, Goeke, R., Bowman, J., Mitchell, D., Morales, M., Lonsdale, C., Colegate, T., Wicenec, A., Arcus, W., Barnes, D., Bernardi, G., Briggs, F., Burns, S., Bunton, J., Cappallo, R., Corey, B., Deshpande, A., Desouza, L., Gaensler, B., Greenhill, L., Hall, P., Hazelton, B., Herne, D., Hewitt, J., Johnston-Hollitt, M., Kaplan, D., Kasper, J., Kincaid, B., Koenig, R., Kratzenberg, E., Lynch, M., McKinley, B., McWhirter, S., Morgan, E., Oberoi, D, Pathikulangara, J., Prabu, T., Remillard, R., Rogers, A., Roshi, A., Salah, J., Sault, R., Udaya-Shankar, N., Schlagenhaufer, F., Srivani, K., Stevens, J., Subrahmanyan, R., Waterson, M., Webster, R., Whitney, A., Williams, A., Williams, C., Wyithe, J.
Format: Journal Article
Published: CSIRO 2013
Subjects:
instrumentation: interferometers
radio lines: general
techniques: interferometric — radio continuum: general
techniques: image processing
early Universe
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/6043
Description
Summary:The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is one of three Square Kilometre Array Precursor telescopes and is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the Murchison Shire of the mid-west of Western Australia, a location chosen for its extremely low levels of radio frequency interference. The MWA operates at low radio frequencies, 80–300 MHz, with a processed bandwidth of 30.72 MHz for both linear polarisations, and consists of 128 aperture arrays (known as tiles) distributed over a ~3-km diameter area. Novel hybrid hardware/software correlation and a real-time imaging and calibration systems comprise the MWA signal processing backend. In this paper, the as-built MWA is described both at a system and sub-system level, the expected performance of the array is presented, and the science goals of the instrument are summarised.

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