We’ve established and manage a new world-class site for radio-astronomy in the remote outback of Western Australia.
Our Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Murchison region, approximately 800km north of Perth, is ideally situated for listening to faint ‘whispers’ from space. Its low levels of radio-frequency interference and sophisticated on-site infrastructure are essential for exploring the origins of the Universe.
It has been built to house our next-generation radio telescope, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, and to host international radio astronomy projects including EDGES, the Murchison Widefield Array and the future Square Kilometre Array.
Many partners have come together to create an Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) for the MRO to operate, and to ensure educational, social and economic benefits flow to the traditional owners of the site, the Wajarri people. The ILUA includes a cadetship program that runs for the life of the telescopes and our staff visit the remote Pia Community School as part of a mentoring program. We’ve co-created resources on Wajarri culture and the MRO. A new ILUA for the future Square Kilometre Array telescope will expand on these benefits.
The Australian and Western Australian Governments have established a ‘radio quiet’ zone to protect this unique radio astronomy site from noise created by modern life. The zone is an area 520km in diameter, centred on the MRO, in which licenced communications and electronic devices such as television transmitters, mobile telephones base stations and CB radios are controlled to limit electromagnetic interference to the radio telescopes on site.
The remote location of the MRO ensures a radio quiet operating environment but makes access to basic infrastructure like roads and power a challenge. In partnership with Australian companies Horizon Power and Energy Made Clean, we’ve constructed a dedicated power station for the MRO. This consists of a solar array, a lithium-ion battery, and four diesel generators. It is the world’s first hybrid-renewable facility to power a major remote astronomical observatory.
The large amounts of data produced by the telescopes on site require significant customised computing power. Computers and other essential electronics are housed in a specially designed control building that prevents electromagnetic interference from escaping: it has two layers of solid metal shielding and airlock doors designed to meet exacting international radio emissions standards. The transport of signals from the telescopes to the control building is via optical fibres.
There are currently three telescopes operating at the MRO, and we’re working with our partners to prepare to host the low frequency antennas for the international Square Kilometre Array project.
Our own Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) has 36 dish antennas, each 12m in diameter. It operates between 700 and 1800 MHz, similar frequencies to digital TV broadcasts and 4G mobile networks. Each antenna is fitted with a unique CSIRO-designed phased array feed receiver (or radio ‘camera’), giving it an extremely rapid survey capability that will be used to study galaxy formation and evolution on very large scales.
The Murchison Widefield Array or MWA is a low frequency array designed to perform large surveys of the southern hemisphere sky and deep observations on targeted regions. It consists of 256 tiles, each with 16 dipole antennas, and operates between 80 and 300 MHz. The telescope is an international project led and operated by Curtin University with collaboration from several international and Australian universities and research institutions.
The Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature (EDGES) run by Arizona State University aims to detect the atomic hydrogen signal that comes from the first stars through observations with individual dipole antennas. It consists of two instruments; a high-band instrument (sensitive to 100-200 MHz) and a low-band instrument (sensitive to 50-100 MHz).
An artist's impression of the Square Kilometre Array's antennas in Australia.
An artist's impression of the Square Kilometre Array's antennas in Australia.
The future Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an international project to build radio telescopes tens of times more sensitive and hundreds of times faster at mapping the sky than today’s best radio astronomy facilities. It will be built in two countries: Australia and South Africa. Australia will host a low-frequency telescope called SKA1-Low, an array of 130,000 small antennas across a distance of up to 65km. The SKA will be the world’s largest public science data project. Once completed it will generate data at a rate more than 10 times today’s global Internet traffic.
We acknowledge the Wajarri people as the traditional owners of the MRO site.