399 research outputs found
The UTMOST: A hybrid digital signal processor transforms the MOST
The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) is an 18,000 square meter
radio telescope situated some 40 km from the city of Canberra, Australia. Its
operating band (820-850 MHz) is now partly allocated to mobile phone
communications, making radio astronomy challenging. We describe how the
deployment of new digital receivers (RX boxes), Field Programmable Gate Array
(FPGA) based filterbanks and server-class computers equipped with 43 GPUs
(Graphics Processing Units) has transformed MOST into a versatile new
instrument (the UTMOST) for studying the dynamic radio sky on millisecond
timescales, ideal for work on pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). The
filterbanks, servers and their high-speed, low-latency network form part of a
hybrid solution to the observatory's signal processing requirements. The
emphasis on software and commodity off-the-shelf hardware has enabled rapid
deployment through the re-use of proven 'software backends' for its signal
processing. The new receivers have ten times the bandwidth of the original MOST
and double the sampling of the line feed, which doubles the field of view. The
UTMOST can simultaneously excise interference, make maps, coherently dedisperse
pulsars, and perform real-time searches of coherent fan beams for dispersed
single pulses. Although system performance is still sub-optimal, a pulsar
timing and FRB search programme has commenced and the first UTMOST maps have
been made. The telescope operates as a robotic facility, deciding how to
efficiently target pulsars and how long to stay on source, via feedback from
real-time pulsar folding. The regular timing of over 300 pulsars has resulted
in the discovery of 7 pulsar glitches and 3 FRBs. The UTMOST demonstrates that
if sufficient signal processing can be applied to the voltage streams it is
possible to perform innovative radio science in hostile radio frequency
environments.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure
A new layout optimization technique for interferometric arrays, applied to the MWA
Antenna layout is an important design consideration for radio interferometers
because it determines the quality of the snapshot point spread function (PSF,
or array beam). This is particularly true for experiments targeting the 21 cm
Epoch of Reionization signal as the quality of the foreground subtraction
depends directly on the spatial dynamic range and thus the smoothness of the
baseline distribution. Nearly all sites have constraints on where antennas can
be placed---even at the remote Australian location of the MWA (Murchison
Widefield Array) there are rock outcrops, flood zones, heritages areas,
emergency runways and trees. These exclusion areas can introduce spatial
structure into the baseline distribution that enhance the PSF sidelobes and
reduce the angular dynamic range. In this paper we present a new method of
constrained antenna placement that reduces the spatial structure in the
baseline distribution. This method not only outperforms random placement
algorithms that avoid exclusion zones, but surprisingly outperforms random
placement algorithms without constraints to provide what we believe are the
smoothest constrained baseline distributions developed to date. We use our new
algorithm to determine antenna placements for the originally planned MWA, and
present the antenna locations, baseline distribution, and snapshot PSF for this
array choice.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in MNRA
The Murchison Widefield Array: the Square Kilometre Array Precursor at low radio frequencies
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is one of three Square Kilometre Array
Precursor telescopes and is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy
Observatory in the Murchison Shire of the mid-west of Western Australia, a
location chosen for its extremely low levels of radio frequency interference.
The MWA operates at low radio frequencies, 80-300 MHz, with a processed
bandwidth of 30.72 MHz for both linear polarisations, and consists of 128
aperture arrays (known as tiles) distributed over a ~3 km diameter area. Novel
hybrid hardware/software correlation and a real-time imaging and calibration
systems comprise the MWA signal processing backend. In this paper the as-built
MWA is described both at a system and sub-system level, the expected
performance of the array is presented, and the science goals of the instrument
are summarised.Comment: Submitted to PASA. 11 figures, 2 table
Interferometric imaging with the 32 element Murchison Wide-field Array
The Murchison Wide-field Array (MWA) is a low frequency radio telescope,
currently under construction, intended to search for the spectral signature of
the epoch of re-ionisation (EOR) and to probe the structure of the solar
corona. Sited in Western Australia, the full MWA will comprise 8192 dipoles
grouped into 512 tiles, and be capable of imaging the sky south of 40 degree
declination, from 80 MHz to 300 MHz with an instantaneous field of view that is
tens of degrees wide and a resolution of a few arcminutes. A 32-station
prototype of the MWA has been recently commissioned and a set of observations
taken that exercise the whole acquisition and processing pipeline. We present
Stokes I, Q, and U images from two ~4 hour integrations of a field 20 degrees
wide centered on Pictoris A. These images demonstrate the capacity and
stability of a real-time calibration and imaging technique employing the
weighted addition of warped snapshots to counter extreme wide field imaging
distortions.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASP. This is the draft before journal
typesetting corrections and proofs so does contain formatting and journal
style errors, also has with lower quality figures for space requirement
The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a dipole-based aperture array
synthesis telescope designed to operate in the 80-300 MHz frequency range. It
is capable of a wide range of science investigations, but is initially focused
on three key science projects. These are detection and characterization of
3-dimensional brightness temperature fluctuations in the 21cm line of neutral
hydrogen during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) at redshifts from 6 to 10,
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 broad-band active dipoles, arranged into 512 tiles comprising
16 dipoles each. The tiles are quasi-randomly distributed over an aperture
1.5km in diameter, with a small number of outliers extending to 3km. All
tile-tile baselines are correlated in custom FPGA-based hardware, yielding a
Nyquist-sampled instantaneous monochromatic uv coverage and unprecedented point
spread function (PSF) 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.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Proceedings
of the IEE
Application of pharmacogenomics and bioinformatics to exemplify the utility of human <i>ex vivo</i> organoculture models in the field of precision medicine
Here we describe a collaboration between industry, the National Health Service (NHS) and academia that sought to demonstrate how early understanding of both pharmacology and genomics can improve strategies for the development of precision medicines. Diseased tissue ethically acquired from patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), was used to investigate inter-patient variability in drug efficacy using ex vivo organocultures of fresh lung tissue as the test system. The reduction in inflammatory cytokines in the presence of various test drugs was used as the measure of drug efficacy and the individual patient responses were then matched against genotype and microRNA profiles in an attempt to identify unique predictors of drug responsiveness. Our findings suggest that genetic variation in CYP2E1 and SMAD3 genes may partly explain the observed variation in drug response
The Murchison Widefield Array
It is shown that the excellent Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory site
allows the Murchison Widefield Array to employ a simple RFI blanking scheme and
still calibrate visibilities and form images in the FM radio band. The
techniques described are running autonomously in our calibration and imaging
software, which is currently being used to process an FM-band survey of the
entire southern sky.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of Science [PoS(RFI2010)016].
6 pages and 3 figures. Presented at RFI2010, the Third Workshop on RFI
Mitigation in Radio Astronomy, 29-31 March 2010, Groningen, The Netherland
The EoR Sensitivity of the Murchison Widefield Array
Using the final 128 antenna locations of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA),
we calculate its sensitivity to the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) power spectrum
of red- shifted 21 cm emission for a fiducial model and provide the tools to
calculate the sensitivity for any model. Our calculation takes into account
synthesis rotation, chro- matic and asymmetrical baseline effects, and excludes
modes that will be contaminated by foreground subtraction. For the fiducial
model, the MWA will be capable of a 14{\sigma} detection of the EoR signal with
one full season of observation on two fields (900 and 700 hours).Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, Accepted for publication in MNRAS
Letters. Supplementary material will be available in the published version,
or by contacting the author
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