Murchison Widefield Array

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a radio telescope in Western Australia, operating at 70-300 MHz, aimed at detecting the hydrogen 21-cm line redshifted from the epoch of reionization (much like LOFAR). It is at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRO) north of Perth. An initial phase (MWA-128 or Phase I) was completed in 2012, with a collecting area of 512 square meters in 128 tiles (each tile consisting of a regular 4×4 grid of 16 dipole antennas, in some descriptions the whole tile being termed an "antenna"). In 2017-2018, it was enlarged (Phase II) to 256 tiles, offering baselines up to 5 km. Original descriptions of the MWA were for 512 tiles, so further expansion seems possible, but the correlator has been a bottleneck and a recent effort has been the installation of one capable of processing data from all the current 256 tiles.