A $2.2 million expansion of the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope has been completed, doubling the number of antenna stations at the facility, as design work on the planned Square Kilometre Array continues.
A $2.2 million expansion of the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope has been completed, doubling the number of antenna stations at the facility, as design work on the planned Square Kilometre Array continues.
The 16-month expansion project increased the number of antenna stations at the remote facility from 128 to 256, according to Curtin University, which is leading the project.
Geraldton-based contractor Gco Electrical undertook the work with staff and students from the university and the facility’s international partners.
About $50 million has been invested in the telescope, which started operations in 2013 and is used for low-frequency radio astronomy.
The recent expansion was funded by a $1 million Australian Research Council grant, with the remainder contributed by the project’s 19 partner institutions.
The Murchison array was built as a stepping stone towards the much larger Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project, which is expected to cost around $1 billion to build.
Part of that larger project will be built in the Murchison region, while part will be built in South Africa.
Cosmic world - installation of the MWA expansion.
Curtin University associate professor Randall Wayth said the new antennas significantly increased the research capacity of the radio telescope.
“By doubling the number of antennas, and quadrupling the size of the area they are distributed across, the telescope is now 10 times more powerful in its exploration of the evolution of the Universe, with an ability to discern details twice as fine as previously,” Dr Wayth said.
“What this means is not only can we explore more of the universe, but the sensitivity and quality of the images we receive is also vastly improved.
“We have already started receiving data from the new antennas including sharper quality images from the giant radio galaxy Fornax A.”
To put that in context for readers, the Fornax A galaxy is about 60 million light years from earth.
“We are hugely excited about what’s in store as we continue to search and explore with the expanded array capabilities,” Dr Wayth said.
Dr Wayth told Business News he was really pleased with the place the Murchison array had in the development of the broader Square Kilometre Array project.
“Curtin University in particular has invested quite a lot in the MWA, and radio astronomy in general, in support of SKA in the future,” he said.
“By pretty much any metric you would choose to use, the MWA has been a really successful project.
“We only started four years ago … we have now over 100 collaboration-led scientific papers, we’ve had our first upgrade, we are deeply embedded in the design process for the SKA as the only operational precursor telescope.
“We’ve contributed as much as we can to that.”
Business News has previously reported that the SKA consortium plans to issue a tender for major construction contracts in the 2020 financial year, with the project’s build to take about five years.
