MWA SMART Survey Raw Data 2018-2019

Full description

The Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) survey is an all-sky pulsar search project that exploits the Murchison Widefield Array’s (MWA) large field-of-view and voltage-capture capability. Finding pulsars and using them for advancing extreme physics is a high-profile science area. Our observations span the September 2018 – December 2019 period, when 40% of the MWA’s visible sky was covered in two separate campaigns. Due to enormous computational requirements of pulsar searching at low frequencies, data processing is undertaken in two passes: the current first-pass processing performs a shallow survey, reaching about one-third of the full sensitivity.

Processing of 1% of the data has already resulted in the discovery of the first new pulsar with the MWA (Swainston et al. 2021) and a second one has been discovered after processing another 1% of data (McSweeney et al. 2022). Details on the beamformer sub-system description and applications have also been published (Swainston et al. 2022). A conservative forecast is ~300 new pulsars by the completion of the full processing. 

Three additional papers are currently in preparation, and the PhD research of three Curtin-based PhD students are centred around these data. Preserving these data will also allow flexible reprocessing in future when newer (and faster) algorithms and software become available. History of past pulsar surveys reveals a huge payoff resulting from such reprocessing; the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts (in Parkes survey data) is an excellent example. Furthermore, the SMART survey will also serve as an important reference survey for pulsar searches with SKA-Low.