A precursor to the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio astronomy project in Western Australia's Mid West region is being readied to commence full operations next month.
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is part of the growing Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in a remote part of the state's Mid West where radio frequency interference is virtually non-existent.
Construction of the $51 million MWA was completed in December and it is now days away from being ready to start producing vast amounts of data.
"Commissioning will be complete this month," International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) deputy director Steven Tingay told an AmCham function in Perth this week.
"We're open for business."
Professor Tingay said the MWA would allow radio astronomers to look back to the beginning of time.
Comprising 2048 antennas in 128 clusters that capture low frequency radio waves, it will allow scientists to image the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.
The low frequency portion of the SKA will eventually have 2.5 million antennas spread over 100km, but for now, the MWA is more than enough to produce breathtaking insights into the origins of the universe - all funnelled at a blistering 10Gb per second to a new supercomputing centre in Perth.
The MWA follows hot on the heels of the October 2012 opening of another SKA precursor project, CSIRO's Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), comprising 36 dishes capturing mid-frequency radio waves.
That array will in coming years be expanded to around 100 dishes as part of the much larger SKA project.
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