The HIRAX array is named in reference to the hyrax, a local mammal, and in parallel to the neighboring meerKAT radio telescope and its eponymous animal.

[2] It has been known since the late 1920s, with the discovery of Hubble's law, that the universe is expanding,[3][4][5] but for most of the 20th century it was assumed that this was a decelerating expansion, following a hot Big Bang.

This is accomplished by looking at the 21-cm line emission produced by hot diffuse neutral hydrogen from distant galaxy clusters and from the intracluster medium.

Due to the expansion of the universe, the 400-800 MHz operating band of the HIRAX instrument corresponds to redshifted 21-cm emission from

The Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD) is a next-generation radio telescope, proposed for construction to start immediately.

Small cylinders derived from the CHIME design and operating from 400-800MHz will be deployed at remote outrigger sites and provide milli-arcsecond-level localization of radio transients.

These will be complemented by focused arrays of 6m composite dishes at each site, instrumented with novel ultra-wideband (UWB) feeds, covering a 5:1 radio band from 300–1500MHz.

[1] This correlation operation is extremely computationally expensive, and is the primary reason why such large interferometric arrays have not previously been fielded.

In full array operation, HIRAX will be required to process 6.5 Tb of data per second, which is comparable to the total international internet bandwidth for the continent of Africa.

[1] The HIRAX collaboration fielded an 8-element prototype array at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) in 2017, which is used as a test bed for hardware and software development leading up to the construction of the full array at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) site in the Karoo.

These outriggers will dramatically improve the angular resolution of the HIRAX array, allowing it to localize FRB detections with sub-arcsecond precision.

[12] The University of KwaZulu-Natal, and the South African Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation announced the official launch of the HIRAX experiment in August 2018.