The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview
Colin J. Lonsdale, Roger J. Cappallo, Miguel F. Morales, Frank H., Briggs, Leonid Benkevitch, Judd D. Bowman, John D. Bunton, Steven Burns,, Brian E. Corey, Ludi deSouza, Sheperd S. Doeleman, Mark Derome, Avinash, Deshpande, M. R. Gopalakrishna, Lincoln J. Greenhill, David Herne

TL;DR
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a low-frequency radio telescope designed for diverse scientific investigations, featuring a large array of dipoles with advanced calibration and imaging capabilities in a radio-quiet environment.
Contribution
This paper presents the design and technical overview of the MWA, highlighting its innovative array configuration, calibration methods, and suitability for key scientific projects.
Findings
High-quality uv coverage and PSF due to array design
Real-time calibration with novel algorithms
Capability to study Epoch of Reionization and solar phenomena
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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
