

The Square Kilometre Array: Radio silence for most powerful telescope in history - bart42_0
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/17/the-square-kilometre-array-radio-silence-in-western-australia-for-most-powerful-telescope-in-history

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naich
Some of the prototype designs for the aerials are currently being made by a
bloke called Pete, in the room next to me. He keeps his bike locked to a table
and it gets in everyone's way, so we let his tyres down occasionally. They
don't tell you that sort of thing in articles like this.

~~~
Trombone12
They also don't tell you that the SKA is in south africa, with portions built
in australia.

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Someone
Don't they?

 _" Once the project is properly under way – with arrays at this site and
another in a remote area of South Africa – it will in effect make up the
biggest radio telescope the world has seen. At Murchison alone there will be
130,000 radio antennas in the first phase, and maybe a million in the second,
taking care of the lower frequency end of the project"_

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hacker_9
"The telescope will be perhaps 10,000 times more powerful than any we
currently have"

"Right now we can spot planets circling around distant stars. The SKA will be
able to spot the equivalent of an airport radar system on one of those very,
very distant planets."

"visitors must be prepared for, scheduled in and accounted for when looking at
the data this place produces. Long before you get to Boolardy, the
346,000-hectare pastoral station on which the Murchison observatory stands,
the radio-quiet restrictions start. Anyone approaching is asked to turn off
all electronic devices."

Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just
so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit
them. I'm glad the Australian government is getting behind something like this
and look forward to seeing what they uncover.

On a side note, the actual writing of the article irked me a bit as the
reporter is clearly non-technical, and when I saw Moores overquoted Law get a
mention it did make me reconsider the accuracy of other statements made by the
writer.

~~~
onion2k
_Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just
so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit
them._

We're not looking for places to visit. The reason we do space science (and
lots of other fields of science) is that the more fundamental knowledge we
have about the universe, the closer we can get to understanding how the
universe is the way it is, and that makes it more likely that we'll be able to
solve problems we have here on Earth.

Ignoring the fundamentals, the desire to do astronomy has lead to more than a
few useful inventions. Figuring out how the sun works is the basis for our
research in to fusion, which could lead to solving humanity's energy problems
forever. The charge-coupled device in every camera in every smartphone was
originally developed for astronomy. GPS only works because we can use
satellites to track deep space objects. Aperture synthesis in MRI scanners
(combining several images in to one image the size of all the cameras
combined) came from combining the results from telescopes together.

A big field in Australia is a _tiny_ price to pay for what the SKA could come
up with.

~~~
steve19
Many things result in technology being developed. War, for example, creates
vast amounts of technology (including rocket technology, satellite etc) , but
that is not a good reason to engage in warfare.

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onion2k
That's not the same thing at all. The benefits of a destructive pursuit don't
make it a more attractive thing to do. They're in opposition to the negatives
of the original action. The side effects of a constructive pursuit _do_ make
it a more attractive thing to do because they are _in addition_ to the already
positive result of the original action.

~~~
steve19
I don't disagree! In fact I firmly believe that the ends never justifies the
means.

But I wonder how many people would consider a major war to be beneficial if it
lead to real fusion ie. limitless clean energy for the world, the end of
energy poverty, of nuclear fission, and end of global warming.

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kenny-log_ins
The technical challenges posed by the SKA really are astoundingly huge. The
data generated by these dishes will require much higher data throuput than
even the fastest optical links between CERN and its tier 1 sites (40 Gb/s),
and they will be in the middle of a remote desert. Then there is the scale of
compute and storage needed to analyse the data, which would be totally
unfeasible with the tech we have today. It's an exciting time to be working in
scientific computing!!

~~~
CHY872
Well, that's as much because CERN doesn't need additional throughput than
anything else; technically it's a solved problem, which makes it one of the
easier ones to do something about :)

We can quite easily send 40Gb/s over a single fibre (I feel like I've seen
over a terabit done...), and the undersea cables (more inhospitable than the
remote desert) are far, far higher bandwidth.

Consuming the data in a timely manner may be tricky, though!

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kenny-log_ins
The optical private network from CERN to the tier 1 site where I work was
upgraded from 10 Gb to 40 Gb between the first and second runs of the LHC.
depending on what goes on during the second run that might need to be
increased again. Building high bandwidth infrastructure for use by lots of
(paying!) customers is probably more viable for large corporations than it is
for science, where you have a budget at the start rather than having things
pay for themselves over time

The storage will need to constantly increase in that time, too.

~~~
CHY872
Yes, of course, but this seems to be a problem where the solution is easily
costed, is commercially available etc, whereas I'd imagine that the rest of
the project is filled with a whole load of world-firsts.

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hhandoko
So excited that this is happening in my backyard :)

FYI, there are quite a few openings to support the SKA:

[http://www.seek.com.au/jobs/in-
wa/#keywords=csiro&location=3...](http://www.seek.com.au/jobs/in-
wa/#keywords=csiro&location=3107)

    
    
      1. Service Manager, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
      2. Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory (MRO) Support Officer
      3. Senior Software Engineer / Architect
      4. Head of Supercomputing
      5. Australia Telescope National Facility (ANTF) Head of Engineering Operations

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saghul
They have some interesting stuff in their GitHub repo:
[https://github.com/ska-sa](https://github.com/ska-sa)

Slides about one of the projects to assist scientists with simulations:
[https://speakerdeck.com/gijzelaerr/rodrigues](https://speakerdeck.com/gijzelaerr/rodrigues)
(Gijs gave the talk yesterday at the Python Amsterdam Meetup)

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teh_klev
There was discussion here a few weeks back about the US National Radio Quiet
Zone which folks may be interested in as well:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569718)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone)

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robbiep
Could someone with some knowledge please elaborate on the potential
implications on a project such as this, for example, if we found ourselves
with clusters of low earth satellites streaming high-bandwith internet to the
entire planet?

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TeMPOraL
An educated guess, but I suppose LEO is far enough for them to be able to
filter out the signal in software.

~~~
robbiep
Kind of would block out a whole range of frequencies though, right? Dozens of
transiting satellites, transmitting at a fairly constant volume, but of random
data?

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TeMPOraL
Not necessarily. From what I heard, with an array antenna you can actually
separate the scalar and vector (directional) component of incoming signals and
ignore those coming from particular direction. So you could either track (in
software) and ignore signals from particular points (satellite), or pretty
much configure your array to be directional.

~~~
robbiep
That's fascinating. But then also makes you wonder why they have gone to such
extents to extinguish any radio signals in the vicinity of the project

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TeMPOraL
If I were to guess, here are several reasons:

\- radio signal power goes down with square of the distance, so closer sources
are much stronger than far ones

\- any (be it software or hardware) filtering is not perfect, so a strong
enough signal will probably still drown the weak ones

\- it may be tad more difficult to filter out a close source because you can't
assume it radiates in parallel lines, which to some extent you can with far
ones (like for most practical purposes here on Earth we assume that sun rays
are parallel)

\- strong signals close to the ground means lots of reflections, which means
more strong signals coming from random directions

\- it's probably cheaper to make an exclusion zone in the middle of a desert
rather than shielding yourself and upgrading the tech even more to filter out
all the surrounding RF noise

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raus22
Is the area a no fly zone?

