The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview
Name
Lonsdale-2009-The Murchison Widefi.pdf
Size
1.48 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Lonsdale, Colin John
Cappallo, Roger J.
Morales, Miguel F.
Benkevitch, Leonid
Bowman, Judd D.
Corey, Brian E.
Doeleman, Sheperd Samuel
Derome, Mark F.
Hewitt, Jacqueline N.
Kincaid, Barton B.
Date Issued
July 2009
Journal
Proceedings of the IEEE
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Citation
Lonsdale, C.J. et al. “The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview.” Proceedings of the IEEE 97.8 (2009): 1497-1506. © 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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 cm line of neutral hydrogen during the epoch of reionization (EoR) at redshifts 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 of the variable radio sky. The array design features 8192 dual-polarization broadband active dipoles, arranged into 512 ldquotilesrdquo 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 monochromatic uv 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.
Subjects
antenna arrays
astronomy
calibration
imaging
ionosphere
MIT Department
Haystack Observatory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher’s policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher’s site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/jproc.2009.2017564
