Early Observations with The Murchison Widefield Array.

Details Early Observations with The Murchison Widefield Array. Early Observations with The Murchison Widefield Array.

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21347426m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #474.26; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.432

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The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), one of the demonstrator projects for the Square Kilometre Array, is a next-generation radio telescope being built in Australia. The MWA will study cosmological reionization, the sun, space weather, and time variability of the radio sky between 80 and 300 MHz, with construction of the full 512-tile system to be complete by mid 2010. As is the case with other future large low-frequency arrays, the visibility data rate produced is extremely large; the correlator, with 3000 fully-polarized frequency channels, is 20 GB/s (a few Peta-Bytes/day).
It is impractical to store data being generated at this rate, and software is currently being developed to calibrate the visibilities and form images from them in real time. Relatively rapid phase and polarization distortions due to the ionosphere set the cadence for the real-time system, with a complete cycle of calibration, imaging and image de-distortion completed every 8 seconds. Furthermore, the gain and polarization response of the antennas need to be measured and accounted for to reach the challenging dynamic range requirements. The software will run on-site on a high-throughput, real-time computing cluster, at several tera-flops.
In the second half of 2008 and early 2009, a series of early observations are being carried out at the MWA site with new generation dipoles, beamformers and receivers. A major objective of these site visits will be to gather information on the antenna primary beams, the sky and the ionosphere, as we prepare to commission a sub-array constructed from the first 32 tiles in mid 2009. Data from these observations will also be used for testing of the real-time calibration and imaging system. In this poster we will present results from these early observations, with an emphasis on some of the main technical challenges.

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