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View Full Version : SKA to be hosted in Australia & South Africa



mips
May 25th, 2012, 03:04 PM
So it was announced today that the Square Kilometre Array will have dual locations instead of just one, bit of a anti-climax.

So it will now span South Africa, some Indian Ocean islands, Australia & New Zealand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a radio telescope in development which will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre.[1] It will operate over a wide range of frequencies and its size will make it 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument. It will require very high performance central computing engines and long-haul links with a capacity greater than the current global Internet traffic.[2] It will be able to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than ever before. With receiving stations extending out to distance of at least 3,000 km from a concentrated central core, it will continue radio astronomy's tradition of providing the highest resolution images in all astronomy. The SKA will be built in the southern hemisphere, in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, where the view of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is best and radio interference least. 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.[3][4] The project has its headquarters in Manchester, UK[5]


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Smilax
May 25th, 2012, 03:58 PM
for €1.5 billion, it really is cheap.

at last, using bandwidth for something other than watching videos of cats.

note, it needs to use so much bandwidth (greater than current global internet use) because, sensitivity is proportional to the square root of bandwidth, which is,
100 times bandwidth equals 10 times sensitivity.

Bucky Ball
May 25th, 2012, 04:04 PM
Strangely coincidental. Just heard the announcement on the radio then came in here, sat at the computer and saw this thread. Fantastic news for us here in Australia.

$9 billion over 50 years and networked with the rest of the world they were saying on the radio.