Abstract

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a 128-element radio aperture array situated in the SKA -low site of Murchison, Western Australia, operating at 80-300 MHz with 1.28 MHz spectral resolution and 30 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth. Its field-of-view encompasses a thousand square degrees in a single snapshot, and it images to arcminute resolution, measuring complete polarisation information. As well as detecting the signal of cosmic reionisation, observations made by the MWA will open windows into galactic and extra-galactic science, solar and heliospheric science and detect new population of transient sources. We will also produce a southern-sky survey likely to result in many serendipitous discoveries. I will discuss the expanding science possibilities available in the coming years as the instrument develops toward its full capabilities, comment on the calibration challenges of aperture arrays and present current results from the 32-element prototype array.