Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/2289/3890
Title: The Murchison widefield arrary: design overview
Authors: Lonsdale, C.J.
Deshpande, A.A.
Gopalakrishna, M.R.
Kamini, P.A.
Kumar, Deepak
Madhavi, S.
Prabu, T.
Roshi, Anish D.
Udaya Shankar, N.
Srivani, K.S.
+33 Co-authors
Keywords: antenna arrays
astronomy
calibration
imaging
ionosphere
Issue Date: Aug-2009
Publisher: IEEE
Citation: Proceedings of the IEEE, 2009, Vol.97, p1497-1506
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.
Description: Open Access.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2289/3890
ISSN: 0018-9219
Alternative Location: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009IEEEP..97.1497L
http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.1828
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2009.2017564
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Appears in Collections:Research Papers (A&A)

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