Square Kilometer Array
For many years, two groups of countries, one consisting of Australia and New Zealand, and one of several sub-Saharan countries led by South Africa, have polished their competing proposals to host the Square Kilometre Array, a huge, 1.9 billion dollar radio telescope , that was first proposed in 1991 and designed to be the most sensitive ever built. After months of deliberations, the nations of the SKA funding announced their decision: that the telescope is divided, and both groups would host some of it.
Objectives of SKA
SKA will assist answer fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of the universe, and whether it contains life beyond our planet. SKA will be able to survey the sky more than 10,000 times quicker than any other existent telescope. SKA’s primary computer will have the processing power equivalent to 100 million PCs.
Why SKA is so big?
A larger telescope can pick up weaker signals and produce sharper images. The resolving power of a telescope is determined by the ratio of size to wavelength of radiation being collected. A typical optical telescope has a diameter of a few million times the wavelength of visible light. The application of this type of relationship with the SKA, which is designed to work with wavelengths measured in meters, would require a plate of thousands of kilometers wide. The SKA is special because of its size. The design calls for around 3,000 individual receivers arranged rather like a spiral galaxy, with most of the telescopes concentrated in an inner core, and the rest arranged into a set of arms up to 3,000km (about 2,000 miles) long. Fibre-optic cables will link each of these dishes to a central processing area, where supercomputers will stitch their data together. When it is fully up and running (by 2024, assuming no big delays), the SKA will be more than 50 times more sensitive than any other radio telescope, and able to survey the sky thousands of times faster.
SKA Consortium:
Project is under Britain-based consortium which includes Canada, China, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom as well as Australia and South Africa. The project has its headquarters in Manchester, UK. The members are:
1. Australia: Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research
2. Canada: National Research Council
3. China: National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
4. Italy: National Institute for Astrophysics
5. New Zealand: Ministry of Economic Development
6. South Africa: National Research Foundation
7. The Netherlands: Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
8. United Kingdom: Science and Technology Facilities Council
IBM and SKA
IBM is designing a computer which will digest twice as much information every day as the entire internet, sifting through radio waves from space in an effort to unravel the origin of the universe.
The machine will be attached to a 1,900 square mile array of telescope antenna, and will be built to ‘suck in’ in radio telescope data which will ‘see’ 13 billion years into the past, back to the dawn of the universe and the Big Bang. The machine will be millions of times more powerful than the fastest PCs today – and will deal with 100 times more information than the output of the Large Hadron Collider.