The OVRO-LWA array — upgraded for real-time continuous all-sky imaging from 12-85 MHz

The Long Wavelength Array at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO-LWA) has recently completed construction, funded via the Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). This has expanded the array to 352 antennas spanning 2.5 km and increase the available frequency range to 12-85 MHz (>3000 channels). A new generation of analog receiver board has been developed with shielded signal paths to greatly suppress cross-talk and minimize reflections. The array will make use of the most versatile digital back-end yet built for radio astronomy, capable of producing a number of data streams simultaneously and commensally, taking advantage of the array's unique all-sky field of view. The data volume is substantial, with >50 TB of data produced every 24 hours, and requires a new pipeline that is implemented within a streaming architecture to allow visibility data to be flagged, calibrated and imaged in real-time, leveraging some of the progress made with the Radio Camera Initiative (www.radiocamera.io). The OVRO-LWA will make use of all-sky images with 10-second time resolution for near-continuous monitoring of the nearest 4000 known stellar/planetary systems to search for magnetospheric radio emission from exoplanets, offering the best avenue towards detecting the magnetic fields of exoplanets for the first time. The same data will be searched for the transient radio signatures of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and the analogs of solar energetic particle (SEP) events and will constrain the 21-cm power spectrum in the Cosmic Dawn epoch (redshift z~18). The array will simultaneously operate a number of dedicated solar modes, including high time resolution beam-forming and imaging of the sun in day light hours, and the raw 5 ns voltage data from each antenna (aggregate data rate of 1 Tb/s) will continuously be searched for extensive air shower emission induced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays (energy range ~ 10¹⁷ - 10¹⁸ eV) with 8,000 such events detected each year. We will present early commissioning data from the array and discuss how the completed array will enable much improved performance for these key science cases.