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Giant Radio Telescope Array Prepares to Begin Construction in Australia and South Africa

Dec 03, 2019

Officials with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be the world’s biggest radio telescope, say they have nearly finalized designs and are planning for construction to begin in Australia and South Africa. This week, at a final engineering meeting in Shanghai, China, designs were presented for the array’s dishes and antennas, which a committee will review in the coming weeks—setting the stage for construction to begin.

"I’m feeling confident,” of starting construction in early 2021, says Philip Diamond, SKA director general at the organization’s headquarters near Manchester, U.K. The design review committee is expected to make suggestions, “but we’re not expecting any show-stoppers,” he says.

The SKA, funded by 13 nations from around the world, will eventually consist of thousands of dishes scattered across southern Africa and a million sticklike antennas in Western Australia. Daunting early cost estimates convinced planners to start with a more limited array that is expected to cost €1.7 billion for construction and 10 years of operation. In this first phase, the SKA group will deploy 130,000 antennas in Australia and add 133 dishes to the 64 of the MeerKAT array, an SKA precursor instrument in South Africa that opened last year.

In addition to contributions to the consortium, individual countries will be building their own facilities to use the data. The Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Shanghai Astronomical Observatory has had a team of researchers working on a big data center that will manipulate data initially processed in Australia and South Africa and then analyze it in cooperation with scientists worldwide, says Shen Zhiqiang, the observatory director. The SKA is going to produce “a huge amount of raw data,” that will be beyond current data transmission and handling capabilities, he says.

Please refer to Giant Radio Telescope Array Prepares to Begin Construction in Australia and South Africa to read more. (Science)
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