The MWA is designed to study radio sources at low frequencies, a poorly known part of the radio spectrum between 80 and 300 megahertz. It will be one of the world’s first telescopes without any moving parts.
The project, undertaken by a consortium of research institutions from the host country, the U.S. and the Raman Research Institute in India, seeks to answer these and other great puzzles that have baffled humanity for long.
In fact, the MWA is not a single telescope but a network of 2,048 dipole antennas, which are arranged in an array of 128 ‘tiles’ with each tile consisting of 16 antennas. Scaled down from the original plans for a 512-tile array, the project has cost the consortium A$51 million. The RRI played a crucial role by designing and developing the digital receivers, the hardware that is critical for the radio telescope.
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