Square Kilometre Array signs off on construction plans – UK last holdout before building phase begins The Board of the Square Kilometer Array has signed off on plans to build the colossal radio-telescope. A note from chair Catherine Cesarsky posted on Tuesday says that a meeting conducted on September 17th and 18th considered the three core documents that describe the project – the “SKA-1 Construction Proposal”, “Observatory …
This sounds like a seriously cool project. So attempts to probe the deepest recesses of the universe will have direct benefits to us microsocpic dots on a microsopic dot!
Hopefully the Johnson and his other idiots can find time from buggering up Blighty to sign off on this.
I don't think these will be quite up to that level (it seems unlikely either singly or together they could persuade a legless Arcturan Megadonkey to go for a walk).
So perhaps The Great Hyperlobic Omnicognate Neutron Wrangler and the Millard Gargantubrain? After all, relatively speaking, this is packet calculator stuff.
(Mine's the one with the radio scripts in the pocket.)
Or make a fascinating addition to FlightRadar. Prospectus reckons the array could detect airport radars light years away.
From a quick skim of the prospectus, it looks fascinating. And Jodrell Bank! And with my engineer's hat on, looks relatively simple, ie lots of antennas to mass produce. Then with my network engineer's hat on, fibre those back up to an ODF, add switches and the rest becomes a software engineer's problem.. Such are the joys of scaling. Seems a bit like a phased array radar on steroids, and when they break down data rates to 'only' the equivalent of 600 blu-ray discs an hour, seems vaguely manageable.
But then processing and interpreting that data falls firmly in my 'I want!' category. No real idea what the data will mean, but I'm sure I'll find some of it fascinating..
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@ Yes Me
130 PB/y...
The prospectus is old. According to SKA's Fact Sheet they now anticipate 600 PB/y.
The growth in antennas are equally impressive: they plan to ultimately have 250 stations in Australia, with 10 000 low frequency aperture array antennas per station.
Mind-boggling all-over.
To think how impressed I was in my youth with my big plans: I think the ultimate hyper-biggest I could conceive of would probably have amounted to one dish antenna connected to a mini computer (if that).
From skimming the paper, they're 2 different antenna designs covering different frequencies. And presumably there'd be scope in future to expand the number/area of the antenna array(s) as more partners get on board. Presumably whatever's learned from the SKA will help shape number & type of future antennas.
@ Jellied Eel
...to expand the number/area of the antenna array(s)...
3000 antennas with a base-line of 3000km across southern Africa. See the illustration of the layout on the bottom right of the page.
See also here for more info on SKA participation in Africa.
Different science goals.
VLBI lets you get incredible resolution of very bright objects at the expense of a lot of observing time.
This is about studying a lot of faint distant objects in lots of wavelengths simultaneously to study lots of different physics. You can still get pretty good resolution across the size of the sites but I don't think there are plans to do VLBI.
> remove irrelevant data that will flow from each antenna
Any chance we could apply that sort of filtering to social media, too?
Just think! An entire year's worth of warbles reduced to no more than a handful of useful, relevant, inoffensive, grammatically correct and factual messages.
@ Roger Kynaston
No Israelites, I'm afraid (not in an official capacity, though I am sure some individuals may be).
@DS999
MeerKAT has been in operation since July 2016 and has already made some significant discoveries.
It was designed and built as a proof of concept, as well as to serve as a test bed. It will form part of the mid-range antennas of SKA eventually.
That's not TS/SCI, is it?
Article 11 [Intellectual Property Rights] of the Convention establishing the Square Kilometre Array Observatory is a particularly hopeful read, with paragraph 2, 3 and 4 all normally being extremely tricky to guarantee do not suffer from wanton abuse and/or wilful misuse.
Although of course, if/when such wanton abuse and wilful misuse of killer projects/absolutely fabulous fabless programs is always to prove suddenly fatal upon discovery, and is well enough understood by any and all who would be involved in such projects and programs to be so policed and protected, is such as good a guarantee of compliance as one is ever likely to get from participating entities.
Ye olde, one strike and you're out forever incentive/00 bond :-)..... works wonderful well, every time if you are licensing to thrill.
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