Winter 2022 Bec’s blog

Welcome to the Winter edition of the MRO news, coming to you just after National Science Week.

Winter has well and truly set in with some cold days in the past few weeks, but it’s has done wonders for the landscape in the Murchison with everything looking so green now. The team have been telling me about the wildflowers that have made an early appearance after the recent rains, I hope you’re enjoying this time of year and not getting too icy in the mornings.

Speaking of my team, they’ve been busy out and about the past few months, participating in events around the Mid West.

In June Chris joined colleagues from DISR and SKA-Low at the inaugural Mid West Aboriginal Business Forum to help promote the opportunities that are coming with the SKA project. Both the Australian SKA Office and SKA-Low updates in this edition feature a little more on the forum.

We were also out for the recent National Science Week event at the Settlement on August 3, bringing water rocket launches and solar systems on strings for all to enjoy. It was great to see Scitech in the Murchison for the event, and a big thank you to the Shire for inviting us to support. We had a great time and are already looking forward to the next Shire astronomy event, the stargazing on October 14. Come down to the Settlement from 6:30pm and we’ll see you there!

We’re also looking forward to welcoming students from the Pia Wadjarri Remote Community School down to Perth in September, where they’ll be joining Curtin University and CSIRO for a week-long science experience. It’ll be a great opportunity to show a bit more of what we do, as well as introduce the students to the Pawsey supercomputers – where all the telescope data from the MRO ends up!

This issue we have a warm welcome to Dr Mohamed Manoufali, our newest team member in the Site Entity. Mo is our RFI engineer, ensuring we continue to appropriately manage the radio quiet zone surrounding the MRO and ensure the best environment possible for telescope observations.

We’ve also got an update on the MRO website, with a new pastoral page where info for our neighbours on anything pastoral and Boolardy Station will sit. The page currently hosts info on requesting access to Boolardy to muster, which has also previously been communicated by email directly to all neighbouring stations. As always, folks are welcome to get in touch about the process or if you need to request access. We’ll always do our best to accommodate requests with sufficient notice and work out compatible dates as quickly as possible.

Also in this edition of the MRO news we have all our usual updates from across our MRO friends, with good news all round including upgrades to the MWA, new discoveries from ASKAP and more.

Enjoy the wildflowers as you’re out and about, until next issue,

Bec

Rebecca Wheadon, MRO Site Entity Lead, CSIRO