2012/06/29 by S. J. Tingay, R. Goeke, J. D. Bowman +57 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/pasa.2012.007
Submitted to PASA. 11 figures, 2 tables
arxiv created 2012/06/29 · arxiv updated 2015/06/05
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.