MWA Project:

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MWA Project
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MWA Project

• Site Murchison Radio Observatory
• Australias proposed SKA Site
• Strategy 512 Antenna Tiles
• Explore Large N / Small D regime
• Correlate all pairs
• Instantaneous complete UV coverage
• confront issues with Wide-Field Imaging,
• Foregrounds, Dynamic Range,

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MWA Project

• Science goals
• Epoch of Re-ionization
• Transients, Sun,
• Implications
• Compact, Dense Array
• Diameter 1.5 km
• Frequency coverage 80-320 MHz

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MWA Project

• Consortium
• MIT Haystack Observatory
• MIT Kavli Institute
• Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophyics
• Australian universities
• (Curtin, ANU, Melbourne, Swinburne,
  Sydney, Tasmania, Western Australia, )
• Raman Research Institute
• CSIRO/ATNF

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Hierarhical groupings
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• Digital Beamformer
• ambient temperature
• (early design)

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• Receiver Node Housing
• 64 Nodes
• Coax RF input from 8 Tiles
• Fiber digital output

Derek Caroll - PSI
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Fielded Enclosure
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• Correlator
• FPGA based hardware correlator
• and fine Filter Bank (10KHz channels)
• Correlate all pairs gt 130,816 Interferometer
  Baselines
• (Prototyping Testing baseband recorders,
  software filter banks
• and correlators, )

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Aerial Photo of 32 Tile Prototype Array
Nov 2007
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Locations of Antenna Tiles in 32T Array
West-East m
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Hydra A
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Hydra A 115 Mhz Jan 2010
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Hydra A 121 Mhz Chris Williams Sep 2010
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Pictor A
Fornax A
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Pictor A
Fornax A
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Pictor A
Parkes Catalog
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Pictor A
Parkes Catalog
MWA Sources
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Full Hour Angle Coverage
21 57 05.8 -69 41 22
UV coverage
32T Image 114 MHz
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Centaurus A
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Centaurus A
MWA 32T 115 MHz
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Centaurus A
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Comparison with X-ray observations
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Solar Radio Bursts 170-200 MHz
Oberoi, Matthews, et al
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Oberoi, Matthews, et al
Grid of Radio Spectra across the face of the Sun
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Instantaneous 32T uv-coverage
Oberoi, Matthews, et al
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Ord, Mitchell Greenhill 2PiP baseband
recording system
Vela
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Ord, Mitchell Greenhill 2PiP baseband
recording system
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• MWA Future
• Milestones
• 32 Tile Array Feb 2010
• 512 Tile Array . --gt 2011

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• MWA Lessons
• development of/on new site is hard
• distributed, international project needs
  project management
• ( takes longer and costs more than
  expected)
• complete instantaneous uv-coverage is very
• powerful