Square Kilometre Array

Telescope of tiles

Far outback in Western Australia, 32 tiles—flat, stationary sensors—each carrying 16 dipole antennas have begun collecting scientific data. These first tiles will ultimately form part of a much bigger array of 512 tiles, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA)—Australia’s second Square Kilometre Array (SKA) demonstrator project. Like CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), the MWA is being [...]

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Managing a data mountain

The world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), is expected to generate more data in a single day, than the world does in a year at present. And even its prototype, the Australia SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), is expected to accumulate more information within six hours of being switched on than has been stored by all previous radio telescopes combined.

Such gargantuan streams of data require serious management, and that will be the job of the $80 million Pawsey High-Performance Computing Centre for SKA Science in Perth. Contracts for the construction of the building to house the Centre are expected to be let in December, 2010.

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Tracing cosmic rays from radio pulses

The energy of ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic rays that strike the Earth’s atmosphere make the energy produced from particle collisions by the Large Hadron Collider look puny. A team based in South Australia is now developing the techniques and technology to find out where such energetic particles could possibly originate. They ultimately hope to use [...]

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Australia’s SKA demonstrator already booked out

It’s not due to begin operating until 2013, but astronomers from around the world are already lining up to use CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). In fact, the first five years of ASKAP’s operation are already booked out, with ten major international Survey Science projects looking for pulsars, measuring cosmic magnetic fields, studying [...]

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SkyMapper’s 268-megapixel camera

On a mountaintop in northern NSW sits a new telescope equipped with Australia’s largest digital camera. The ANU’s SkyMapper facility has been established at Siding Spring Observatory to conduct the most comprehensive optical survey yet of the southern sky.

Fully automated, the telescope is measuring the shape, brightness and spectral type of over a billion stars and galaxies, down to one million times fainter than the eye can see.

The heart of the system is a $2.5 million, 268- mega pixel digital camera that covers an area 40 times greater than the full Moon every minute. The huge data set (100 megabytes per second) will be shared with the astronomical community and wider public.

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Australia and New Zealand—the home of next-generation radio astronomy?

Imagine a telescope so revolutionary that in one week it will gather more information than that contained in all the words spoken in human history.

The Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, will be the world’s most powerful radio telescope and will dramatically increase mankind’s understanding of the universe.

The infrastructure enabling this expansion in knowledge may be placed in Australia and New Zealand, whose proposal to host the SKA has been shortlisted by the international science community. A final decision is expected in 2012.

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PM’s Prize winner working on astronomy pathfinder

CSIRO’s Dr John O’Sullivan, winner of the 2009 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, is now working on the next generation of radio telescopes.

John’s latest efforts are directed towards the development of an innovative radio camera or ‘phased array feed’ with a uniquely wide field-of-view for the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.

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