Square Kilometre Array Observatory construction commences After thirty years of development, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) announced Monday it has commenced construction of its radio telescopes in both South Africa and Australia. "After 18 months of global procurement and construction activities around the world, on 5 December 2022 the SKAO enters a new era by …
There's some more details in this article, esp some yummy bandwidth numbers
> https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-12-05-blue-ska-thinking-construction-begins-on-square-kilometre-array/
And MeerKAT, which SKA will further extend
> https://www.sarao.ac.za/science/meerkat/about-meerkat/
And more of an overview of the entire SKA
> https://www.skao.int/en/explore/telescopes
I couldn't see anything on the links you gave.
There is going to be an awful lot of data to shift. Given the sites remoteness a satellite link would often be used but wouldn't that interfere with what they are trying to record?
Thinking about it nearly all the data will be going off site so that would help.
It's fiber all the way - 100GbE out from the two sites (then carried over links to the various continents with data centres who ingest the data) so by todays standard nothing particularly special, by the time it's complete we'll probably be seeing 100 GbE ports on consumer devices :)
> because both are nicely remote and therefore aren't polluted by stray radio signals.
Too late, now stray radio signals will come raining down from the skies, from constellations of hundreds (soon thousands) of Internet-serving satellites. No need for local, ground-based pollution anymore...
There is little chance a faint signal from "the very first stars in the universe" or some such will be audible over the constant screaming of those orbital loudspeakers.
I certainly does not help to have the close heavens full of emitters, but the EM spectrum can be easily filtered to get rid of most of the littered bands. Would be nice to not have these gaps in the spectrum, but the full spectrum is luckily orders of magnitude wider than our human based sh*t beaming down
> the EM spectrum can be easily filtered
I'm not so sure about "easily". When you're at those incredible levels of sensitivity, even the slightest harmonics and other induced parasites sound like a pneumatic drill running while you try to listen to a barely perceptible sound. Also, they don't necessarily listen to just a couple specific frequencies, they need the whole image to be able to see what's out there.
There is a reason why they go through such pains to build those things in the boonies instead on simply relying on some filters to clean out the noise.
All true, I was a bit generic. There are lots more interference issues, but the design of the facilities over great distances and hundreds resp. 10s of thousands of independent sensors mean that most will be integrated back to (close to) zero, leaving the real signal available for science.
The same technological advancements that enable rolling out large setups in space, work here on earth to deal with that. I don't say it's not an added problem to deal with, but science dealing with new problems is just what delivers us more progress. It's not a zero sum deal. Science is great...
> science dealing with new problems is just what delivers us more progress.
Science doesn't really need those new, artificial problems. Science is already facing the biggest challenge of all, understanding our universe, and anything making this more difficult is definitely not a welcome challenge, just a pain in the neck.
Else we could also chop off the hands of scientists or gouge their eyes out. Those "problems" might "deliver us more progress" too.
It's a little more nuanced than "SKA will be blinded" but, for anyone interested, here is a link to the SKA document addressing the issue.
The SKAO quoted:
"Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX (which is currently deploying the Starlink mega-constellation), said recently in a public statement that:
“… Starlink won’t be seen by anyone unless looking very carefully and will have ~0% impact on advancements in astronomy.”
The SKAO study shows that, for radio telescopes in general and for SKA in particular, this is not the case and specific mitigation actions will be needed to minimize this impact."
So, once again, some selfish, self-opinionated, rich guy thinks only of himself and doesn't do his homework to understand the impact his business(es) will have on specific communities, in this case the scientific "world".
> So, once again, some selfish, self-opinionated, rich guy thinks only of himself
> and doesn't do his homework to understand the impact his business(es) will have
> on specific communities, in this case the scientific "world".
True, but you will probably at one time be a happy, maybe unknowing, user of the selfishly created Starlink...
It always cuts more ways
> Too late, now stray radio signals will come raining down from the skies, from constellations of hundreds (soon thousands) of Internet-serving satellites. No need for local, ground-based pollution anymore...
It'll be tens of thousands, Starlink alone has license for something like 30,000 satellites, and various competitors between them are planning a similar number.
It's a phased array so the signal from one satellite arriving at one antenna will not correlate with the same signal arriving at a different antenna (unless they set the delays such that they are focusing on said satellite). It does increase the noise though, so SNR suffers. Fortunately with radio astronomy, for most objects you can simply spend more time on the object to get more signal.
Imagine listening to alien conversation a one light year away:
[Alien1] No you talk to them people!
[Alien2] I am shy, you talk to them
[Alien1] I put a kettle on, you talk!
[Alien2] You know I am socially awkward do you? Do you want me to leave bad impression?
[Alien1] Nah mate, you good. Just talk to them oh key?
[Alien2] Now you are being awkward. Are you sure this is a tea?
[Alien1] What are you a narc now?
[Alien2] I bet you would like some no? You filthy little alien.
[Alien1] Don't talk to me like that, you make me blush!
[Alien2] Okay, you know what? Get on your knees!
[Alien1] * squeaky noises *
[Alien2] * squeaky noises *
It took more than two hundred years for Australia's highest court to remind us officially that there's more than one sovereignty in this land. Think about that for a minute. That's a fact that some people have yet to assimilate, and looks like taking a long time yet to reconcile. Education is hard work.
Unstolen native title endures (Mabo). Temporary alienation of native title is reversible (Wik). That's the law of the land.
It's easy to be dismissive or in denial, but it's real, and it matters.
Cheers from Yawuru country!
To be fair, that sentence clarified the point later, with "with native title holders". And in some cases, a more accurate statement might be "land that the colonialists had stolen, but have now returned to indigenous organizations (with various degrees of enthusiasm/reluctance).
How native titles are managed in Australia I do not know, but if you want to find out about the NZ situation there is exhaustive information at https://maorilandcourt.govt.nz/. I found it a quite interesting diversion several months ago, but do not expect to find the information useful anytime soon.
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I cannot help feeling that the picture of the mobile antenna looks like something the presenters on the BBC children's program 'Blue Peter' could have made out of wire coat hangers, but I suspect that it is a bit more technical than that. Oh well, maybe they'll show kids how to make their own SKA to go with their Tracey Island.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UzWkEHOdZA
Or for a more leisurely approach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM_iV7R8rTM
I was scoping out Seek and there were jobs going for data managers and big data engineers on this project a few years ago. The base station for the data management is at Curtin university, quite close to where I live. One of the Professors in charge of this project was a Joey leader at our Scout group so as you can imagine, we had some fun STEM activities :)
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