@article{eceff192b0b44b36ac42935d3b568d5f,
title = "The murchison widefield array: Design overview",
abstract = "The Murchison Widefield Array is a dipole-based aperture array synthesis telescope designed to operate in the 80300 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 tiles 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 tiletile 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.",
keywords = "Antenna arrays, Astronomy, Calibration, Imaging, Ionosphere",
author = "Lonsdale, {Colin J.} and Cappallo, {Roger J.} and Morales, {Miguel F.} and Briggs, {Frank H.} and Leonid Benkevitch and Bowman, {Judd D.} and Bunton, {John D.} and Steven Burns and Corey, {Brian E.} and Ludi DeSouza and Doeleman, {Sheperd S.} and Mark Derome and Avinash Deshpande and Gopala, {Modavanatt Ramakrishna} and Greenhill, {Lincoln J.} and Herne, {David Edwin} and Hewitt, {Jacqueline N.} and Kamini, {P. A.} and Kasper, {Justin C.} and Kincaid, {Barton B.} and Jonathan Kocz and Errol Kowald and Eric Kratzenberg and Deepak Kumar and Lynch, {Mervyn J.} and S. Madhavi and Michael Matejek and Mitchell, {Daniel A.} and Edward Morgan and Divya Oberoi and Steven Ord and Joseph Pathikulangara and T. Prabu and Rogers, {Alan E.E.} and Anish Roshi and Salah, {Joseph E.} and Sault, {Robert J.} and Shankar, {N. Udaya} and Srivani, {K. S.} and Jamie Stevens and Steven Tingay and Annino Vaccarella and Mark Waterson and Wayth, {Randall B.} and Webster, {Rachel L.} and Whitney, {Alan R.} and Andrew Williams and Christopher Williams",
note = "Funding Information: Manuscript received November 14, 2008; revised February 8, 2009. Current version published July 15, 2009. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant AST-0457585; the Australian Research Council under Grants LE775621, LE882938, and DP345001; and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Grant FA9550-0510247. C. J. Lonsdale, R. J. Cappallo, L. Benkevitch, B. E. Corey, S. S. Doeleman, M. Derome, B. B. Kincaid, E. Kratzenberg, D. Oberoi, A. E. E. Rogers, J. E. Salah, and A. R. Whitney are with the MIT Haystack Observatory, Westford, MA 01886 USA (e-mail: cjl@haystack.mit.edu). M. F. Morales was with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA. He is now with the University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195 USA. F. H. Briggs, J. Kocz, E. Kowald, A. Vaccarella, and M. Waterson are with the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. J. D. Bowman was with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA. He is now with the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 USA. J. D. Bunton, L. deSouza, and J. Pathikulangara are with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Epping, NSW, Australia. S. Burns is with Burns Industries, Inc. Nashua, NH 03064 USA. A. Deshpande, M. R. Gopala, P. A. Kamini, D. Kumar, S. Madhavi, T. Prabu, A. Roshi, N. U. Shankar, and K. S. Srivani are with the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, India. L. J. Greenhill, J. C. Kasper, D. A. Mitchell, S. Ord, and R. B. Wayth are with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA. D. E. Herne, M. J. Lynch, and S. Tingay are with the Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. J. N. Hewitt, M. Matejek, E. Morgan, and C. Williams are with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA. R. J. Sault and R. L. Webster are with the University of Melbourne, Australia. J. Stevens is with the University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia. A. Williams is with the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.",
year = "2009",
month = aug,
doi = "10.1109/JPROC.2009.2017564",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "97",
pages = "1497--1506",
journal = "Proceedings of the IEEE",
issn = "0018-9219",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
number = "8",
}