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  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Dishing up the goods: Square Kilometre Array moves out of the theoretical and into the contractual

(2021/10/18)


The governments of South Africa and Australia have signed agreements formalizing the construction and operation of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) telescopes by the Observatory's governing body.

The intergovernmental radio (and world's biggest) telescope will survey the sky over ten thousand times faster than has ever been done before, in the hopes of understanding the universe's biggest secrets.

It will use around 3,000 15-metre dishes, plus hundreds of thousands of low-frequency aperture array telescopes, for a total of over 130,000 antennas. With what is expected to be 130 petabytes of data produced a year, it will also require a powerful HPC engine.

[1]

The project was conceptualized over 30 years ago and now has over a decade of engineering design work under its belt. In February of this year, the council required to make the one square kilometre tech into a reality was [2]finally established , so it seems about time for things to charge forward for the $1.5bn telescope, even if it's just to [3]sign contracts .

[4]

[5]

The two documents penned last week establish rights and responsibilities of each party regarding sites, assets, and necessary yet to be built infrastructure, as well as each government's obligation to provide radio frequency interference protection for the instruments and other matters.

The SKAO will have operations at four separate facilities in each country. They will include a remotely located telescope array, an Engineering Operations Centre, a Science Operations Centre, and a Science Processing Centre for the supercomputer handling the country's incoming data which will then be shifted off to the various member countries' astro-boffins. There will also be a number of SKA regional centres for the scientists to tinker around in.

[6]

South Africa and Australia were chosen for wide-open spaces, but also because their positions in the southern hemisphere provide the best view of the Milky Way with the least radio interference, an [7]ever-growing concern since the telescope's conception.

Meanwhile data on SKA-precursor, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and its 36 parabolic antennas at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia, was published in peer-reviewed [8]The Astrophysical Journal on October 12. Turns out the telescope detected some unusual radio wave signals six times in the first nine months of 2020.

The global group of researchers who studied the signals said they are coming from somewhere in the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy and might be from a new stellar object, as they don't fit any known radio emission pattern. The "object's" presence was picked up by ASKAP six times in the first nine months of 2020.

[9]

Several things making these radio signals different are the brightness of the object, which not only varies, but also switches on and off at what appears to be random intervals.

The signal is also highly polarized and oscillates, meaning its light oscillates in only one direction, and that direction rotates.

[10]Astroboffins reckon they've detected four hidden exoplanets by probing distant radio waves

[11]Square Kilometre Array Observatory has a council now, so building super-sensitive €1.3bn telescope is next on agenda

[12]Adiós Arecibo Observatory: America's largest radio telescope faces explosive end after over 50 years of service

[13]Square Kilometre Array signs off on construction plans – UK last holdout before building phase begins

The boffins at one point lost the signal and another radio telescope, the MeerKAT in South Africa (which will be incorporated into the SKA-Mid array one day), found it again, but this time it was acting differently.

Before anyone queues up the 1997 movie Contact , we might just have some cosmic indigestion on our hands.

"The information we do have has some parallels with another emerging class of mysterious objects known as galactic center radio transients (GCRTs), including one dubbed the 'cosmic burper'," co-author and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor of physics David Kaplan [14]told the university news outlet.

And while for now it's all still very much a mystery, there's hope that the completion of the SKA telescopes and corresponding supercomputers will provide definitive answers to these types of questions in the future. ®

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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YW3ujDzdiVHh4vbMGGhQigAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/18/uk_finally_signs_off_on/

[3] https://www.skatelescope.org/news/skao-signs-hosting-agreements-australia-south-africa/

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YW3ujDzdiVHh4vbMGGhQigAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YW3ujDzdiVHh4vbMGGhQigAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YW3ujDzdiVHh4vbMGGhQigAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/08/skao/

[8] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac2360

[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YW3ujDzdiVHh4vbMGGhQigAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/12/exoplanet_radio_galaxy/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/08/skao/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/arecibo_telescope_decommissioned/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/ska_signoff/

[14] https://uwm.edu/news/mystery-radio-wave-signal-from-the-heart-of-our-galaxy-found/

[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/



Alternatively

Yet Another Anonymous coward

That's 0.05mWales or 16,300 square cricket pitches in New Imperial Units

10 years of deign work ?

andrewmm

That means the electronics is already 15 years old ?

Re: 10 years of deign work ?

Yet Another Anonymous coward

Mostly no - when it was started nobody had any idea how to do the electronics.

Building it hoping extrapolating that GPU/FPGA/storage would catch up was a reasonable plan.

Unlike a certain optical survey telescope that worried about the data size and spent most of the design time inventing their own tape drive technology, because nothing available could store the XXXX bytes of data expected.

Where XXXX is a number that sounded insane at the time but is now probably on your phone

Anonymous Coward

I would *love* to work on the supercomputers storing and processing that data. Any idea how I get a job like that? o.o

Def

Apply?

Muscleguy

Look up the academics involved in this and contact them.

Space??? who needs space?

Timbo

"130 petabytes of data produced a year"

That's 130 million Gigabytes...or about 356,164 Gigabytes per day (@365 days per year) !!

That's an awfully BIG amount of data...and once the SKA starts up, and assuming it doesn't go offline too often (at either of it's two main locations) data storage for this will always be increasing - plus one wonders what sort of data processing will be required?

I assume some data sets will be entirely devoid of any data and/or full of radio "noise" - but it will still need to be "processed" before being discarded.

And whether like the SETI@home project (now offline), data will be split into "usable" packets, that can be worked on/processed individually.

Re: Space??? who needs space?

Korev

I think the technologies just about here to handle that, it'll just be really, really expensive...

An array that could take 4GB/s isn't that hard in the age of flash and ~32Gb/s is well within 100GigE...

Therefore it is necessary to learn how not to be good, and to use
this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the cause.
-- Machiavelli