The Square Kilometer Array

EyesWideOpen writes "A very ambitious project to build the world's largest radio telescope, named the Square Kilometer Array or SKA, is in its early design stages. As its name suggests the SKA will be one square kilometer in size if it gets built. The SKA consortium (consisting of Cal Tech, Cornell, SETI, the Max Planck Institute and Beijing Astronomical Observatory to name a few) hopes to build the telescope by 2010. "If they succeed the SKA will be so big and precise it will jump the world's current best, the American Very Large Array in New Mexico, by a factor of 100, both in sensitivity and resolution." It's interesting to note that the project is based on technology that will only exist in three, five or seven years -- to account for data rates of tens to hundreds of terabytes per second and storage in the petabytes -- so they're counting on Moore's law to hold true."

Comments

Very wrong direction for astronomy.

[Krapangor]

While it might sound sensible at a first glance to build bigger and bigger telescopes on earth, it is in fact incredible stupid.
Modern telescopes should be located on satellites in earth orbit or even on the moon. The troubles with atmosphere and earth's magnetic field fuck up with any observations, no matter at which wavelength. What these guys do might sound technologically advanced, but it is in fact 19th century science.
Modern astronomy calls for the methods and technology applicable in the 21th century which mainly includes space-based observation.
These fools didn't look even on the facts: the incredible success on the hubble space telescope. (Well, there were some troubles with a lens in the beginning, but this is a typical NASA fault: replying too much flawed technology just because it comes from the US, instead of choosing superior European engineering).