UK finally signs off on Square Kilometre Array Observatory Convention
- Reference: 1608275230
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/18/uk_finally_signs_off_on/
- Source link:
The Convention governing the SKAO requires that at least five nations, including the three host countries – Australia, South Africa, and the UK – must ratify the text. South Africa and Australia have already signed, Portugal did so last week and the Netherlands and Italy had already put pen to paper. The UK gave the relevant treaty the nod in July 2019 but had not signed the convention until this week.
With the ink now dry, the SKAO can now take over the project. Work will start when a first meeting is staged at the SKAO's HQ at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire some time in early 2021.
The organisation has a fair bit to get done. The SKA will include around 3,000 15-metre dishes, plus hundreds of thousands of low-frequency aperture array telescopes for a total of over 130,000 antennas. While design work is well advanced, this kit all needs to be built and installed. Most of the hardware will reside in Australia and South Africa, but some elements will also land in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zambia.
There’s also the job of ingesting 8.8 terabytes of data per second from each telescope , then filtering out the noise to shrink it into something more manageable and worthy of being analysed. Final annual output is expected to be 130 petabytes a year, still a hard-to-wrangle quantity of data for the world’s astro-boffins.
Exactly what will make this all happen is yet to be revealed, but we already know of [1]200,000 new AMD cores destined for one Australian supercomputer. Testbeds have also explored the wide-area and data centre networking required to transport data.
Answers to all those challenges have not yet been found. But that’s part of the reason for the project, as it is hoped that just as CERN produced the World Wide Web, the SKA might provide reasons for creation of other massively useful technologies.
Even if the tech the array requires turns out to be too exotic for wider use, it will provide humanity with its best-ever instrument for observing our universe. The planet’s current largest radio telescope is the 196,000m 2 Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in China. The recently-destroyed Arecibo Observatory was a mere 73,000m 2 . As the SKA’s name implies, its total area will be one square kilometre - one million square metres. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/19/new_pawsey_supercomputer/
[2] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Nasty, nasty
If you think the Kalahari / Karoo is a nasty, hot place, just be glad you're not going to Johannesburg or Pretoria. Just last week my mother's elderly neighbour almost was hijacked at the local supermarket. When she got into her vehicle a man climbed into the passenger seat and started giving her directions where to drive to. Lucky for the neighbour, a car guard saw what happened and was able to rescue her. This is in broad daylight in what is presumably the better side of Pretoria. A few days later two elderly people were [1]assulted and robbed at gunpoint at a garden center not far away from the supermarket. Nasty place indeed.
[1] https://www.netwerk24.com/Nuus/Misdaad/soektog-na-plante-ontaard-in-nagmerrie-na-aanval-20201214
Nasty hot places?
As someone who grew up in the Karoo, I have to say...
You're not entirely wrong.
Area ...
just determines exposure times, it's the diameter that affects resolving power.
Meerkat array
Large parts of the SKA in South Africa snd Australia are already built and operating.
Gi's a job
I'll stroke some of their servers if they want.