"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"
"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.
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.
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...
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.
We can quite easily send 40Gb/s over a single fibre (I feel like I've seen over a terabit done...), and the undersea cables (more inhospitable than the remote desert) are far, far higher bandwidth.
Consuming the data in a timely manner may be tricky, though!
Terrestrial cables are likely harder to lay: you have to worry about land access—national parks, native title, private land—and the W.A. outback is an extremely challenging environment to work in.
Getting dedicated DWDM fibre to Murchinson is a big project unto itself.
The storage will need to constantly increase in that time, too.
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.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 OperationsSlides 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)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569718
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...
(source: I am a radio astronomer)