The primary goal of HIRAX is to use 21-cm intensity mapping to measure baryon acoustic oscillations. HIRAX will be an interferometer that comprises roughly 1000 six-meter dishes placed in a close-packed, redundant configuration and will be deployed at the SKA site in the Karoo desert in South Africa. The operating frequency of 400–800 MHz corresponds to a redshift range of 0.8 to 2.5. The dishes will be stationary and will have a 5–10 degree field of view, and the dishes will be periodically repointed in elevation to build up coverage of the southern sky.
HIRAX is led by the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), hosted as a guest instrument by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) and managed by a consortium which includes six additional South African institutions: the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Durban University of Technology (DUT), Nelson Mandela University (NMU), Rhodes University (RU), University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of Western Cape (UWC).
There are seven international partners in addition to the eight institutions that make up the HIRAX SRE consortium. These include McGill University, ETH-Zürich, Université de Genève, EPFL, Simons Foundation, National Research Council Canada and West Virginia University. There are eleven additional collaboration members, including Botswana International University of Technology, Laboratoire Astroparticule & Cosmologie at Paris-Diderot, Stellenbosch University, University of British Columbia, University of Oxford, University of Toronto, The Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in India, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carnegie Mellon University, Caltech-JPL and Yale University.