South Africa Wins Major Share of SKA Universe Searching Telescope Project

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Written by Richard Finlayson, Senior International Editor for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--After a nail-biting build up to the final decision, the international square kilometer array (SKA) radio telescope project will be shared between South Africa and Australia. The countries voting on the outcome were Canada, China, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Sources say that it was a majority decision with the European countries voting for South Africa, while the others voted for Australia.

SKA will have a range of dish arrays, mid-frequency aperture arrays and low-frequency aperture arrays. Professor Justin Jones, associate director for science and engineering at SKA South Africa, said, "There are two frequency components, the low-band (70-500 megahertz) and mid frequency range (500 megahertz to 10 gigahertz), and that is how the split has been made in phase one. These will be 190 dishes built in South Africa to supplement the existing 64 MeerKAT dishes at mid-frequencies. In Phase I, Australia gets 60 dishes to supplement its 36 square-kilometer array pathfinder (ASKAP) dishes, as well as the aperture arrays for the low frequency part of the radio telescope."

Jones continued: "The 60 dishes to be built in Australia are, however, conditional on the development of viable receiver technology. In phase two South Africa will get all the dishes and aperture arrays working at mid frequency range, while Australia will get the remainder of the aperture arrays."

South Africa has eight regional partners in SKA : Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia. A network of antennae will cover these countries and fiber optic cables twice the length of the equator will interconnect the dishes and receptors.

South Africa's minister of science and technology said that a key factor in the site decision was the recognition of the MeerKAT telescope being designed and built in the Karoo region of the Northern Cape by South African scientists and engineers as a critical step towards the implementation of SKA.

The MeerKAT will supplement the sensitive SKA Phase I dish array, providing the majority of the collection area of the most sensitive telescope in the world. SKA will be 50 times more sensitive and have 10,000 times the survey speed of any existing telescope.

A major part of South's Africa's delight in winning the major portion of the SKA project is that it will develop and retain scientific and technological skills that otherwise might have drained away. There will be spinoffs downstream for industry and manufacturing, with state-of-the-art technology and experience available before and after the construction phase is completed in 2024.

How the project will push the scientific/technological envelope is already evident in the award at the beginning of April of a $42 million tender to IBM and Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron), to research extremely fast, but low-power exa-scale computer systems targeted for SKA. The computer system will be targeted to read, analyse and store one exabyte of raw data per day, two times the entire daily traffic of the internet

Scientists estimate the processing power required to operate the telescope will be equal to several millions of today's fastest computers. Astron is one of the scientific partners in the international consortium that is developing the SKA. When completed in 2024, the telescope will be used to explore evolving galaxies, dark matter and the origins of the universe 13 bi8llion years ago.

The cost of the construction phase of the project is estimated at a minimum of $1.9 billion and annual maintenance for the life of the project is $125 million.

For related information see March 31, 2011, article - South African Clash Erupts Over Gas and Radio Telescope Projects.

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