Slashdot Mirror
SKA Telescope Site Debate Not Over Yet
angry tapir writes "Although earlier reports claimed that a scientific panel recommended South Africa over Australia as the best site for the proposed Square Kilometre Array, the SKA board of directors is still debating which country will host the enormous US$2.1-billion radio telescope. The scientific panel only recommended South Africa by a narrow margin earlier this month."
If only we could get reasonable internet access
I guess it comes down the safety and political stability for the long term.
In South Africa there have been problems with rural people being murdered, and while their political change appears to have by-and-large completed, no guarantee.
In Australia, their government appears stable, but they've had some issues with censorship and excessive searching of people at their ports, plus one runs the risk of running afoul of biker gangs, and having to be avenged by a lone cop driving the last of the V8 interceptors. Then there's the problem of who runs Barter Town and breaking deals and facing wheels...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I go with Australia. Much of the code we use is written there. And they have wallabys. South America seems like a bunch of tin pot dictators (Brazil excepted, of course).
Whatever decision they made will have a lasting effect for the next 50 years
They should not make the decision based on any other criteria but for the best of this program itself
Political correctness has no place in Science research
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
How does anything in this new story conflict with the earlier /. story? To quote the original summary:
A scientific panel has narrowly recommended South Africa over Australia as the best site for the proposed Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an enormous US$2.1-billion radio telescope. While the project's member states have yet to make a final decision on where the telescope will go, the odds are now that the African bid will ultimately win out against the joint bid from Australia and New Zealand to host the project.
So to summarise the summary, the scientific panel recommended South Africa by a narrow margin, but the member states are still to make a final decision.
But this new story says that the the scientific panel recommended South Africa by a narrow margin, but the board of directors is still to make a final decision.
This is simply a dupe. Actually, that is not quite true. It is probably more accurate to say that it is simply a dupe. A dupe, simply.
Build it across both. The increased distance between the extreme ends of the telescope will give you a larger virtual dish (which is the whole point of the telescope) and the increase in lines of longitude mean that you get longer to observe something.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Jamaica wouldn't work.
It's too hot.
THL phish sticks
why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
Because this isn't a Jodie Foster movie based on a book by Carl Sagan, and because in the scientific world we generally have to make do with less money than we want and do twice as much with it. Secondly, because you are not doubling the chances to succeed. To use a car analogy, you don't need two cars to drive you from here to the shops, in fact you can't drive both cars there. Whether the SKA is in Australia or in South Africa doesn't mean that we would get "twice as much data" or "twice as good" data. We would get the same data twice, which is a terrific waste of money.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
A scientific project in South Africa?
South Africa has mining experts, heavy engineering, defence experts, past nuclear experts, good computing and maths backgrounds.
They built their own nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, bio/chem weapons and did well with very complex aerospace upgrades.
Australia has a research reactor, a few universities with hand me down computers and still needs direct guidance from UK and US intelligence/contractors for complex projects.
Staff would always be an issue in Australia - getting the right people out of the cities is really, really expensive.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I humbly submit Prairie Chapel Ranch at Crawford Texas, U.S.A. There's nothing there worth more than the advancement of man's understanding of the universe. And It would even raise property values!
A good way to compare these countries, given that we're talking about a radio astronomy project, is to look at their radio astronomy facilities. Trimble & Ceja did a study of the citation rates of papers based on data from different telescopes (as a measure of how significant the rest of the world thinks the results from those telescopes are). Numbers 2 and 3 are the Australia Telescope Compact Array and the Parkes Radio Telescope, also in Australia. (Number 1, by a large margin, is the Very Large Array in the US.) There's only one South African radio telescope, and it's lumped under "Other".
It's also a bit surprising that you cite South Africa's strengths in mining (when Australia is China's primary source of raw materials), heavy engineering (Australia's shipyards are busier than South Africa's) and defence (Australia is collaborating on the JSF). It's particularly amusing when you say that Australian universities have a few hand-me-down computers - presumably like the Pawsey Centre, which is on the top500 supercomputer list - and that's only stage 1, with 7% of the final installed capacity. And what's it being used for? Radio astronomy.
The only cogent point in your post is Australia's limited nuclear experience - which would be really relevant if the SKA were nuclear-powered. (Hint: it's not.)
We would get the same data twice, which is a terrific waste of money.
Actually, this isn't true. If you look at the same patch of sky with two telescopes, and sum the images together, the noise averages out, and you get a better image. sqrt(2) times better, in fact.
This is exactly what the SKA are going to do.
Look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Long_Baseline_Interferometry
It does mean though that there has to be a an incredibly fast, low-latency and reliable data connection between all the elements in the array for it to be of any use though.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I know about VLBI, and it's not quite the same thing. If you combine the signals from separate telescopes coherently, as in VLBI, the noise in the image goes as 1/n, where n is the number of telescopes. If you just form separate images with separate telescopes, then add the images together incoherently, the noise goes as 1/sqrt(n). So, in exchange for the extra effort required to phase up the separate telescopes for VLBI, you get a bigger reduction in the noise.
You don't actually need a low-latency connection between the array elements, though. You can record the data on a flash drive and send it by carrier pigeon if you like. (Though obviously this is far from optimal.)
Given the petabytes of data that will pour from SKA, the carrier pigeon would have to carry one hell of a lot of flash drives.
Coincidentally, I recall a story from SA a year or two ago where some geeks proved that the throughput by carrier pigeon between two points was better than their ISP. :D Latency, of course, sucked.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
+1 for you - so far you're the only one who has made a ska reference! :D I was thinking about something on the lines of "Weren't the Beatles inspired by ska?" - but didn't come up with anything funny enough to post by itself.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/