HERA: Illuminating Our Early Universe

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This is a program to develop and build a prototype in South Africa for a new radio telescope array to measure the emission signature of neutral hydrogen from the Epoch of Reionization, the unexplored phase in the history of the universe when the first stars, galaxies, and quasars were formed. The project will train undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in instrumentation and facility development, and will foster international scientific collaboration through a student exchange program with South Africa. This program will host 3-4 students per summer, working on related research and engineering problems at a rotating host institution. Other education and outreach efforts include internships, REUs, and community college transfer programs to radio astronomy. The awardees will field test a new telescope design and deploy a 37-element array at the radio-quiet Square Kilometer Array site in South Africa, using 14-m fixed-pointing parabolic dishes which will operate between 50 to 225 MHz. The design is driven by a recent breakthrough that allows current instruments to remove foreground emission that would otherwise corrupt the measurements. Exploring the Cosmic Dawn and the Epoch of Reionization is one of the three main science priorities for the current decade highlighted by the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey (New Worlds New Horizons, 2011).