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Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder Goes Live
New submitter Random Data writes "Australia's initial part of the Square Kilometre Array has officially opened. 36 dishes out of the eventual 96 are now online, with a data output of 40Gb/s (and the article includes LoC conversion!). More info is available from CSIRO."
Looks like Wikipedia's article on the Square Kilometre Array is incorrect.
With a budget of €1.5 billion, construction of the SKA is scheduled to begin in 2016 for initial observations by 2019 and full operation by 2024.
Not that I'm surprised, considering how horribly broken that sentence is in the first place.
Better known as 318230.
Voyager just left the solar system and we're already trying to bring it home?
the full SKA array -- most of which will be in South America.
Don't be afraid. There's nothing harmful to click on on the internet! Oh, right. CSIRO.au links are generally going to be safe, though I'm sure someone somewhere will find something objectionably. Call it Rule negative-34: someone on the Internet will find *anything* offensively pornographic!
Short answer: The SKA is (as the name suggests) a whole heap of radio telescopes spread out over 1 square kilometre. By using interferometry you can treat them as a giant dish about 1km across, which lets you detect much fainter signals and also increases the resolution, or ability to see detail.
This pathfinder is a proof of concept that may be rolled into the full thing. At the moment it looks like the main SKA will be in South Africa, while a similar array with fewer dishes will be in Australia. The Australia version just had its official opening, which is what the story is about. But three paragraphs is too long for a submission, so there were links to sites with further info.
Some of you might remember previous slashdot articles featuring the CSIRO sueing tech companies over patents. :)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/04/22/1545238/csiro-settles-with-tech-giants-over-wifi-patent-spat
http://slashdot.org/story/12/04/05/2131233/the-story-behind-australias-csiro-wi-fi-claims
Well...this is the kind of thing the cash from those patents is paying for
I, for one, welcome our new CSIRO nerd overlords.
You shall know him by his Sig
Any self respecting patriotic American would recoil in horror on seeing km^2 in the headline! Bad things happen with metric titles; witness:
9 mm - A Nicholas Cage movie about snuff movies.
21 grams - a Sean Penn movie about the weight of a soul.
Now if they'd just rounded it up to 250 acres, there would be less commotion!
Short answer: The SKA is (as the name suggests) a whole heap of radio telescopes spread out over 1 square kilometre.
Other way round. Square kilometer refers to the combined aperture, not the baseline, which is much bigger.
Mod parent up. The grandparent is underestimating the size of SKA by a factor of many thousands.
Here's a couple of cents from a (student) radio astronomer:
The name of the SKA refers to the total collecting area of the telescope, not the area over which it will be built. So if it's built of dishes with an area of (say) 100 m^2 each, there'll be 10,000 of them, for a total of 1,000,000 m^2 = 1 km^2. They'll be spread out over a distance of thousands of kilometres - which, as you say, lets you use them as an interferometer with the same resolution as a single giant dish of that size.
There are two main components of the planned SKA: the high-frequency part, which uses classical parabolic dishes, and the low-frequency part, which uses weird-looking omnidirectional antennas (like this). The high-frequency part is being built mainly in South Africa, but part of it (ASKAP, the telescope in this story) is being built in Australia. The low-frequency part is being built entirely in Australia (and has its own pathfinder, the MWA).
Another two cents, if anyone's interested:
The South African pathfinder for the high-frequency component of the SKA is called MeerKAT, and the Australian one is ASKAP, the one mentioned in this story. MeerKAT will have more dishes, which makes it more sensitive and better at looking at faint astronomical objects. ASKAP is less sensitive, but uses fancy receivers (PAFs: Phased Array Feeds) that let it see more of the sky at any moment. The plan is to use ASKAP to do wide-area surveys, looking for interesting things on the sky, and MeerKAT to do more sensitive follow-up observations on whatever ASKAP finds. So they should work well together. It's yet to be decided whether the full SKA will use phased array feeds or not: they're a big improvement over traditional receivers, but they're more expensive.
ASKAP has 36 dishes built so far, but not all of them have phased array feeds yet. The first 6 PAFs have been in place for a while; the next 6, with some design improvements, are currently being built. (Last I heard, anyway.)