2026/07/25 by Vinand Prayag, Nivedita Mahesh, Gregg Hallinan +7
#astro-ph.CO
MANAS is a single antenna, ground-based platform built to measure the sky averaged ('global') redshifted 21-cm signal from Cosmic Dawn. The cosmological signal is expected as a ~ 100-200 mK absorption trough against a foreground of 3-4 orders of magnitude brighter. The current crop of 21-cm experiments are limited by systematics namely the sky, ionosphere, beam, and signal path effects. MANAS combines an achromatic monopole antenna, an absolutely-calibrated receiver, and in-situ beam mapping with the OVRO-LWA, and develops an end-to-end error budget that quantifies each systematic.