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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."
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".
But I thought LOC was a measure of information not data.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's probably a cloud solution involving a few million g-mail accounts ;)
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.
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.
In arrays, you want _many baselines_ (telescope to telescope distances) and you want them to be _long_, because that will make your image better. It shouldn't be as large as the earth-radius though, otherwise you can only observe a few hours per day.
The SKA is being built in South Africa or Australia, and New Zealand would like to provide an "addon" to the SKA -- if it is going to be built in Australia --, that will provide a *huge* improve on the baselines involved. Tests have shown that the imaging capability drastically improves, so it would be well worth it.
Disclaimer: I am researching in the NZ institute mentioned.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I assume that name would not pass?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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
> 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.
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