Abstract

In the lead-up to the construction of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a pathfinder instrument called the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) was built to serve as a technological testbed for the radically new design concepts planned for the SKA . With its powerful snapshot capabilities and enormous field of view, the MWA has proven itself to be a highly versatile instrument, not just for studying the distant universe but also for the new window it has opened on the skies of planet Earth. In an extraordinary demonstration of this new breed of technology, the MWA has revealed a population of high-altitude tubular plasma density structures aligned along the geomagnetic field, thought to be the first visualisation of previously elusive HF/VLF ducts. Its remarkable capabilities as a regional-scale monitoring tool promise to provide new insights into space weather and ionospheric dynamics, at a level of detail and breadth not previously possible. This talk will introduce the next generation of radio telescopes and discuss the scientific potential of these instruments as quantitative probes of the geospace environment.