The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview
Abstract
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) 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. These are detection and characterization of 3-dimensional brightness temperature fluctuations in the 21cm line of neutral hydrogen during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) at redshifts from 6 to 10, solar imaging and remote sensing of the inner heliosphere via propagation effects on signals from distant background sources,and high-sensitivity exploration of the variable radio sky. The array design features 8192 dual-polarization broad-band active dipoles, arranged into 512 tiles comprising 16 dipoles each. The tiles are quasi-randomly distributed over an aperture 1.5km in diameter, with a small number of outliers extending to 3km. All tile-tile baselines are correlated in custom FPGA-based hardware, yielding a Nyquist-sampled instantaneous monochromatic uv coverage and unprecedented point spread function (PSF) 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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0903.1828,
title = {The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview},
author = {Colin J. Lonsdale and Roger J. Cappallo and Miguel F. Morales and Frank H. Briggs and Leonid Benkevitch and Judd D. Bowman and John D. Bunton and Steven Burns and Brian E. Corey and Ludi deSouza and Sheperd S. Doeleman and Mark Derome and Avinash Deshpande and M. R. Gopalakrishna and Lincoln J. Greenhill and David Herne and Jacqueline N. Hewitt and P. A. Kamini and Justin C. Kasper and Barton B. Kincaid and Jonathan Kocz and Errol Kowald and Eric Kratzenberg and Deepak Kumar and Mervyn J. Lynch and S. Madhavi and Michael Matejek and Daniel Mitchell and Edward Morgan and Divya Oberoi and Steven Ord and Joseph Pathikulangara and T. Prabu and Alan E. E. Rogers and Anish Roshi and Joseph E. Salah and Robert J. Sault and N. Udaya Shankar and K. S. Srivani and Jamie Stevens and Steven Tingay and Annino Vaccarella and Mark Waterson and Randall B. Wayth and Rachel L. Webster and Alan R. Whitney and Andrew Williams and Christopher Williams},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.1828},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the IEEE