The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history

The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history(theguardian.com)

88 points by bart42_0 10 years ago | 34 comments

naich 10 years ago |

Some of the prototype designs for the aerials are currently being made by a bloke called Pete, in the room next to me. He keeps his bike locked to a table and it gets in everyone's way, so we let his tyres down occasionally. They don't tell you that sort of thing in articles like this.

Trombone12 10 years ago | |

They also don't tell you that the SKA is in south africa, with portions built in australia.

Someone 10 years ago | | |

Don't they?

"Once the project is properly under way – with arrays at this site and another in a remote area of South Africa – it will in effect make up the biggest radio telescope the world has seen. At Murchison alone there will be 130,000 radio antennas in the first phase, and maybe a million in the second, taking care of the lower frequency end of the project"

hacker_9 10 years ago |

"The telescope will be perhaps 10,000 times more powerful than any we currently have"

"Right now we can spot planets circling around distant stars. The SKA will be able to spot the equivalent of an airport radar system on one of those very, very distant planets."

"visitors must be prepared for, scheduled in and accounted for when looking at the data this place produces. Long before you get to Boolardy, the 346,000-hectare pastoral station on which the Murchison observatory stands, the radio-quiet restrictions start. Anyone approaching is asked to turn off all electronic devices."

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them. I'm glad the Australian government is getting behind something like this and look forward to seeing what they uncover.

On a side note, the actual writing of the article irked me a bit as the reporter is clearly non-technical, and when I saw Moores overquoted Law get a mention it did make me reconsider the accuracy of other statements made by the writer.

onion2k 10 years ago | |

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them.

We're not looking for places to visit. The reason we do space science (and lots of other fields of science) is that the more fundamental knowledge we have about the universe, the closer we can get to understanding how the universe is the way it is, and that makes it more likely that we'll be able to solve problems we have here on Earth.

Ignoring the fundamentals, the desire to do astronomy has lead to more than a few useful inventions. Figuring out how the sun works is the basis for our research in to fusion, which could lead to solving humanity's energy problems forever. The charge-coupled device in every camera in every smartphone was originally developed for astronomy. GPS only works because we can use satellites to track deep space objects. Aperture synthesis in MRI scanners (combining several images in to one image the size of all the cameras combined) came from combining the results from telescopes together.

A big field in Australia is a tiny price to pay for what the SKA could come up with.

DanBC 10 years ago | | |

I read it as "this is a good thing, an incredibly good thing, that we devote land to pure science".

steve19 10 years ago | | |

Many things result in technology being developed. War, for example, creates vast amounts of technology (including rocket technology, satellite etc) , but that is not a good reason to engage in warfare.

fijal 10 years ago | |

It's maybe worth noting that while the space is indeed large, it's not actually used for anything much. The human impact of turning of electronic devices is negligable, given there is no cellphone reception anyway. In Karoo (where most of SKA will stand, in South Africa) they indeed turned off a few radio towers for cellphones and the site is radio-free (you can only use computers in isolated containers) but it only affected a few farmers. Asking people to turn phones off in one plane is probably far more of a hassle :-)

mturmon 10 years ago | |

This is an interesting point. It can work out the other way. The Thirty Meter Telescope, a very large segmented mirror optical telescope, is being built on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Construction is being protested by activists for desecrating the mountain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope_protest...

and a pretty good listicle here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/hawaii-telescope-pr...

ceejayoz 10 years ago | |

You may be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...

Residents in this part of West Virginia can't have cell phones, Wifi, and you can't even drive a car with spark plugs within a mile of the telescope.

semi-extrinsic 10 years ago | | |

It looks like all the restrictions on common consumer equipment are only within a 20 mile radius. The restrictions in the major part of the zone are on high power transmitters (i.e. TV and radio broadcasts).

kenny-log_ins 10 years ago |

The technical challenges posed by the SKA really are astoundingly huge. The data generated by these dishes will require much higher data throuput than even the fastest optical links between CERN and its tier 1 sites (40 Gb/s), and they will be in the middle of a remote desert. Then there is the scale of compute and storage needed to analyse the data, which would be totally unfeasible with the tech we have today. It's an exciting time to be working in scientific computing!!

hhandoko 10 years ago |

So excited that this is happening in my backyard :)

FYI, there are quite a few openings to support the SKA:

http://www.seek.com.au/jobs/in-wa/#keywords=csiro&location=3...

  1. Service Manager, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
  2. Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory (MRO) Support Officer
  3. Senior Software Engineer / Architect
  4. Head of Supercomputing
  5. Australia Telescope National Facility (ANTF) Head of Engineering Operations

saghul 10 years ago |

They have some interesting stuff in their GitHub repo: https://github.com/ska-sa

Slides about one of the projects to assist scientists with simulations: https://speakerdeck.com/gijzelaerr/rodrigues (Gijs gave the talk yesterday at the Python Amsterdam Meetup)

teh_klev 10 years ago |

There was discussion here a few weeks back about the US National Radio Quiet Zone which folks may be interested in as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569718

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...

robbiep 10 years ago |

Could someone with some knowledge please elaborate on the potential implications on a project such as this, for example, if we found ourselves with clusters of low earth satellites streaming high-bandwith internet to the entire planet?

phinux 10 years ago | |

Yes, satellites are a problem. However they transmit in narrow frequency windows so you deal with this by simply notching out those frequency channels. You do need to make sure that there isn't so much power in the intereference that it does nasty things like send amplifiers into compression.

(source: I am a radio astronomer)

TeMPOraL 10 years ago | |

An educated guess, but I suppose LEO is far enough for them to be able to filter out the signal in software.

robbiep 10 years ago | | |

Kind of would block out a whole range of frequencies though, right? Dozens of transiting satellites, transmitting at a fairly constant volume, but of random data?

raus22 10 years ago |

Is the area a no fly zone?

1. Service Manager, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre 2. Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory (MRO) Support Officer 3. Senior Software Engineer / Architect 4. Head of Supercomputing 5. Australia Telescope National Facility (ANTF) Head of Engineering Operations

There will be far too much data for it all to be simply recorded. The plan is to "use an algorithm to reduce that data down to a smaller magnitude that you can then process further on a super computer", Morgan says.