Final Race for Designing the Largest Radio Telescope On Earth

Hundreds of experts, in fact the world's very best are engaged in the final race for designing the Largest Radio Telescope On earth. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Project enters a new era and takes a major step towards this amazing construction. The funding made available by the partners for this detailed design phase is 120 million euros. 

Deploying thousands of radio telescopes, in three unique configurations, which will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky thousands of time faster than any system currently in existence. The SKA telescope will be co located in Africa and Australia. It will have an unprecedented scope in observations, exceeding the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope by a factor of 50 times, whilst also having the ability to image huge areas of sky in parallel. With a range of other large telescopes in the optical and infrared being built and launched into space over the coming decades, SKA will perfectly augment, complement and lead the way in scientific discovery. 

"This is a level of engagement only seen in revolutionary projects!", said Professor Phil Diamond, Director General of the SKA Organization. "That we have been able to pull together a team of some of the world's best experts, most prestigious institutions and major companies reflects the passion and ambition of the scientific and engineering communities to work on an inspirational world-class project of the scale of the SKA." 

The SKO is a global endeavour and one of the largest and most ambitious scientific projects in history. From 2018, onwards, eventually thousands of large dishes and literally millions of radio receivers, will be deployed in desert regions in Africa and in Australia, eventually making the SKA one of the true giants of the astronomical and scientific world. In the initial stage in 2013 SKO sent out invitations to research organisations and industry partners around the globe to participate in the analysis and design of the components of the SKA during its three year detailed design phase. This request phase included a conceptual design of the telescope, a work breakdown structure, a statement of the work required and additional reference documents. As with other projects of this magnitude, such as the development of the Large Hadron Collider or major space programmes, the SKA has been broken down into various modules called "Work Packages". Each of these Work Packages will be managed by a consortium of international experts. 

"Each element of the SKA is critical to the overall success of the project, and we certainly look forward to seeing the fruits of each consortium's hard work shape up over the coming years," said Professor John Womersley, Chairman of the SKA Board. "Now this multi-disciplinary team of experts has three full years to come up with the best technological solutions for the final design of the telescope, so we can start tendering for construction of the first phase in 2017 as planned. The directors of the SKA Board feel that the consortia selected represent some of the world's very finest scientists and engineers."

Each consortium has been provided detailed management and verification plans, schedules, milestones and budgets for the various elements with which they have been tasked. The strategic aim of the SKA Organisation, which is coordinating the global effort, is that the work undertaken within each of the consortia is focused on these specific elements of the SKA project and that their work will span the entire pre-construction period and meet critical design reviews along the way. 

With a collecting area of one square kilometre, the scale of the SKA represents a significant step forward in engineering. When operational, the SKA telescope will provide a monumental increase over current scientific capabilities and be able to address some of humankind's greatets questions such as understanding of gravity, the nature of dark energy, the very formation of the Universe and whether or not life exists somewhere. Great, isn't it? :D :) 

Some interesting facts about SKA

• SKA Organisationm with its headquarters at Jodrell bank Observatory, near Manchester, UK was established in December 2011 as a not-for-profit compnay in order to formalise relationships between the international partners and to centralise the leadership of the project. 
• The data collected by the SKA in a single day would take nearly two million years to playback on a typical MP3 player. 
• The SKA central computer will have the processing power of about one hundred million PCs. 
• The SKA will use enough optical fibre linking up all the radio telescopes to wrap twice around the Earth. 
• The dishes of the SKA when fully operational will produce 10 times the global internet traffic as of 2013. 
• The SKA super computer will perform 10 raise to 18 operations per second- equivalent to the number of stars in three million Milky Way galaxies- in order to process all the data that the SKA will produce. 

You can read more on: SKA