Credit: Greg Rowbotham ICRAR UWA 2016 A new $1 million Federal Government grant to Curtin University will enable a major upgrade to the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), giving the giant radio telescope even greater power to read and process signals captured from distant outer space. The grant is through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme (NCRIS) and administered by Astronomy Australia Ltd (AAL) and will replace the aging correlator, or 'brains' of the telescope, which has been used since the MWA began operating in 2012. The MWA is a low-frequency radio telescope that scans the Earth's southern skies and consists of more than 4000 spider-like antennas spread across several kilometres within CSIRO's Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in remote Western Australia.