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New Zealand Joins Aussie Bid For Vast Radio Telescope Array
schliz writes "A radio telescope in New Zealand has joined five in Australia to challenge Southern Africa to host the international Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in 2012. The newly connected telescope in Warkworth, New Zealand (PDF), is connected to an Australian data processing facility via a 1 Gbps network. Each telescope reportedly produces up to 1 Tb of data per hour of observation. IBM expects the whole of the SKA to produce an exabyte of data per day."
Mmmmm .... VLBA sexy. Exabytes, *arghghgh*
said in the voice of a hungry Homer Simpson
I can imagine the total lack of confusion when absolutely no one mistakes the SKA with the music genre Ska.
I really don't envy the guys in charge of backups...
Gotta love the creativity that goes into these names. Too bad they stopped with the previous naming pattern, I was waiting for the "Fucking Enormously Huge Array".
The newly connected telescope in Warkworth, New Zealand (PDF), is connected to an Australian data processing facility via a 0.000048828125 LOC/s network. Each telescope reportedly produces up to 0.05 LOC of data per hour of observation. IBM expects the whole of the SKA to produce 52428.8 LOC of data per day.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I do not understand what is so interesting about this. Another dish added to various international VLBI networks. There is also one such dish near Urumqi in China in a very remote area. There are so many of these kind of dishes around the world. Even here in the Netherlands we have one. But we also have LOFAR, which is also capable of producing large amounts of data everyday. This kind of systems usually only operate for short periodes and the data produced are immediately processed and only the results are stored.
I work on millimeter- and submillmeter-wave frequency radio telescopes in Arizona that occasionally do VLBI runs at 1.3mm (230 GHz). We don't have anything like a 1Gbps data link; it's more like 10 Mbps. It's hard to get the phone company to install a fiber cable run up a mountain.
Our VLBI data are stored on hard disks at a rate of ~1 Gbps, then correlated later on some big computer back east. We have to wait days to learn if interference fringes were detected!
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
When I imagine a future civilization, I always think of the technology they have and the consequences of that technology. I never took into account the large buffer between both.
What stops humans from launching telescopes to Lagrangian points all around us?
Sometimes I think we should create an outside enemy, just to regroup the entire species in a single entity, able to attack bigger problems than our tiny local quarrels.
That story should have ended with the man blowing his brains out. Chicken shit.
Australia has more square kilometres than most. Hip Hip Array!!
On a distantly related note I once worked with a guy who was doing synthetic aperture radar from a sled on the antarctic ice cap. On his return he planned to spend weeks manually reducing the data so I wrote a fortran program for him which did the whole job in three hours on VAX 11/730.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's hard to get the phone company to install a fiber cable run up a mountain.
How expensive would it be to lay out the fiber yourselves? About $5k per mile to the closes phone company supported location? How far would it be?
Just asking.
It's all politics. There's the environmental impact problem. The folks who arranged for our underground power line really screwed up by not putting a fiber in the same trench; now it's virtually impossible to get the Forest Service to permit additional work. Four words: Mount Graham Red Squirrels!
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Think twice, New Zealand. If the aliens start beaming you back porn, then Australia will have to filter your radio telescopes.
now it's virtually impossible to get the Forest Service to permit additional work.
- Buy the fiber roll.
- Throw some green and brown paing buckets over it.
- Before it dries, throw in little branches, leaves, and red squirrels.
- Buy a ninja costume, a shovel and a pair of night vision goggles.
- Every night, go to the forest, lay out some meters of underground fiber and hide the camo roll.
If someone finds you, dressed as a splinter cell ninja, carrying a shovel and an oversized rotten donut, you can make a deal: if he finds out what's your PhD on, you give him $5k, if he doesn't, he leaves you alone.
What's more important? You can have internet or the endangered Mount Graham Red Squirrels can have an environment free of redneck construction workers fucking everything up? You think maybe those laws exist for a reason?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Actually, to classify as a New Zealand story, it would have to be about a guy in the South Island and his flock of sheep... In particularly the favouritism towards at least one particular sheep.
signature is pants
The latency will be a killer when all that data has to get processed by the Great Firewall.
Or more accurately that of certain editors to promote their favourite and/or home nations: namely Australia, and to a lesser extent New Zealand.
Just search to see the hugely disproportionate number of "stories" from-or-about Australia on this site.
Will the vast array fit in narrow New Zealand?
I assume that name would not pass?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
We don't shear our sheep down south, we keep them for ourselves!
It's South Africa. Not Southern Africa. South Africa.
Which is the name of a country by the way, not a region.
I've been following the bid process for SKA for quite a few years. As far as I can tell South Africa (together with its other Southern African partners) have a clear advantage over Australia (now together with NZ)
There are a few reasons for this:
1. The passing of the South Africa's Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act in 2007 declares almost the whole of the Northern Cape province (an area about 1.5 times that of the UK) into an astronomy advantage area. Amongst other things it means that light pollution will be limited and that the whole area will eventually be turned into a radio quiet zone.
2. Much of the technology used in South Africa's pilot program (MeerKAT) will be directly useable in SKA. By comparison, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder project has much less tech that will be useable in SKA without major redesign and modification.
3. Price. From the start keeping the price down was a very high priority goal for the SA bid. E.g. they developed a new process to manufacture the dishes that is much cheaper than conventional methods. Now, after the credit crunch where many scientific budgets are getting cut, this strategy is paying off.
Disclaimer 1: I am a South African and therefore far from neutral
Disclaimer 2: The last time I read extensively on this is more than six months ago, so if there were significant developments recently then I might not be aware of them
siener's youtube channel
Jamaica was an obvious choice but they have other problems to deal with at the moment.
England also put in their bid but unfortunately all the images would only come back in 2-tone.
Of course, they're still considering putting up SKAtelies instead.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
> What's more important?
Astronomy. Fuck the squirrels. They'll survive a little construction work.
> ...redneck construction workers fucking everything up?
Bigot.
> You think maybe those laws exist for a reason?
All laws exist for a reason. It usually isn't a good one. In this case it is because reactionary ecofreaks have better political connections than do astronomers.
Add some windmills to yout installation and come up with a plausible reason why they need fiber. The permits will slide right through.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"That's not a telescope array..... *that's* a telescope array."
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One of the stories I heard, about another VLBI telescope, was that getting to within about 15km was easy, but the last stretch costed about 400,000 euro. These telescopes tend to be in rather inaccessible terrain.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
When I was 16, it involved two minimum wage guys who were 16 and a device a bit bigger than a roto-tiller and a spool of cable.