page_title: Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The CHIME Pathfinder telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton, British Columbia, Canada. The Pathfinder is a prototype for the full CHIME telescope.
context_page_description: The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment is an interferometric radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, Canada which consists of four antennas consisting of 100 x 20 metre cylindrical parabolic reflectors with 1024 dual-polarization radio receivers suspended on a support above them. The antenna receives radio waves from hydrogen in space at frequencies in the 400–800 MHz range. The telescope's low-noise amplifiers are built with components adapted from the cellphone industry and its data are processed using a custom-built FPGA electronic system and 1000-processor high-performance GPGPU cluster. The telescope has no moving parts and observes half of the sky each day as the Earth turns. It has also turned out to be a superior instrument for observing the recently discovered phenomenon of fast radio bursts.
  CHIME is a partnership between the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto and the Canadian National Research Council's Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory. A first light ceremony was held on 7 September 2017 to inaugurate the commissioning phase.
context_section_description: In 2013, the CHIME Pathfinder telescope was built, also at DRAO. It is a smaller-scale version of the full instrument, consisting of two, 36 x 20 metre semi-cylinders populated by 128 dual-polarization antennas, and is currently being used as a testbed for CHIME technology and observing techniques. Additionally, the Pathfinder will also be capable of making an initial measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) with the intensity mapping technique and will become a useful telescope in its own right.
  Construction of CHIME began in 2015 at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) near Penticton, British Columbia, Canada. In November 2015, CHIME was reported to be "nearly operational", requiring the installation of receivers, and construction of the super-computer. In March 2016 the contract for the processing chips was placed.
  CHIME construction ended in August 2017. A first light ceremony with federal Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan was held on 7 September 2017 to inaugurate the commissioning phase. The science operations commenced in late September 2018, and began to detect several events within its first week. 
  One of the early discoveries of the CHIME/Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB) was the second repeating FRB to be observed, FRB 180814. CHIME/FRB also discovered the first FRB that repeats at regular intervals: 180916.J0158+65 has a periodicity of 16.35 days.  At a distance of only 500 million light years, it is also the closest FRB ever discovered.
  CHIME is so sensitive it is expected to eventually detect dozens of FRBs per day.
caption: The CHIME Pathfinder telescope, a prototype for the full CHIME telescope.
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