I've got some information that I thought you guy's might be interested in.
Imagine, if you will, a giant radio telescope with a dish so big, it has a total of 1 square kilometer for it's collecting area. In other words the dish is as big as a small town. Such a telescope would be many times more sensitive and powerful than any previous radio telescope ever built, don't you think? Such a large radio telescope would of course be impossible to build. However, what one can do is build an equivalent telescope array of many interconnected smaller dishes with a total collecting area of 1 square kilometer. That's the whole idea of the SKA or square kilometer array.
The SKA project was initially envisioned by collaborating groups of astronomers. While the total collective area of the dishes are 1 km^2, they would actually spread over an area between 3000 km^2 and 5000 km^2 so that it can look at a much wider area of the sky at any given time (an area so wide, in fact, that the dishes have to be arranged in a spiral configuration so as to account for the Earth's rotation around it's own axis). The SKA would also be 10000 times more sensitive than any other previous radio telescope ever built. In fact it would be sensitive enough to pick the equivalent of a television signal origination from a planet a few hundred lightyears away - a SETI researcher's absolute dream but that is not it's main purpose. The main purpose of the SKA is to try and solve some of the main problems currently facing cosmology and astrophysics, including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, providing more elaborate tests of general relativity, and being able to see into the so-called "dark ages" of the universe (the time between the big bang and when the first stars started to form).
Of course the main problem for such a project was to decide where it's location would be. After all, the core of the thing would have to be in a location where there is almost complete radio silence since even a single cell phone near it would screw up any signal it gets from space. With regards to this location issue though, South Africa and Australia were the two countries shortlisted as possible being able to host the SKA from an initial list of four countries several years ago.
In the South African bid, the core of the array would put in the Karoo desert, with the dishes spread across nine sub-saharan african countries. The Australians on the other hand, are planning to put the core of the array in the Australian outback with the dishes spread between Australia and New Zealand. Now the reason I'm saying all this is that next month on 5 April, the board of directors are going to decide whether the SKA will be hosted in South Africa or Australia. There's been a leak that suggests that the SKA advisory committee recommended South Africa to the board on technical grounds but that doesn't necessarily mean that Australia won't get to host it:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/australian-bid-falters-for-25b-telescope-20120309-1upsp.html
Both SKA teams have worked hard on their proposals though, each already having their own precursor telescopes as a technology demonstration (South Africa's MeerKAT telescope and Australia's ASKAP). So I can only hope that whoever win's the bid, both teams will cooperate in future. Here's the Wikipedia article on the SKA for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array
12 Mar 2012, 6:24 am
