Square Kilometre Array prototype 'scope achieves first light One of the radio telescope designs to be used by the Square Kilometre Array has achieved first light. Known as SKAMPI, the 'scope was designed by a team whose members hailed from ten nations and built in China. The model tested last week was assembled in 2018 in the Karoo region of South Africa, which will host some of the SKA …
...because a lot of the data used by scientific Distributed Computing projects through BOINC comes from things like this. Milkyway@home is using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to build the most accurate map of our galaxy, Einstien@home uses data from radio telescopes (MEERKAT, Arecibo when it was active, etc.) plus LIGO to investigate objects of extreme gravity, and of course LHC@home is using real world data from CERN to not just process data from experiments but also model experiments before and after they are run.
My point is that there is going to be so much data that it will take decades to work through. Some scientists are even going back to data gathered by the Pioneer and Voyager missions and applying modern computing techniques so see things we couldn't see in the past. The money saved by the science teams and the quality of the results they get from volunteered processor time speak for themselves. And this a good thing in the era of carbon credits.
Really excited about this progress. In our group, together with colleagues from the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, we are currently developing astronomical image processing software, which works neatly on optical data from various sources like the VLT or EUCLID, but still has issues in radio astronomy (we have worked on LOFAR and APERTIF data). We hope to start testing on MEERKAT data soon, but the aim is to hunt for faint structures in SKA data as well. I gather data cubes of some 800 giga-voxel will be used in a next challenge. Time will tell how well this will go.
"That effort helped the SKA team to create system design qualification documentation. SKA boffins have since worked to enable..."
This commentard humbly suggests that the term for a group of people associated with this project should be referred to as a "SKA band".
