Kilometre array8/17/2023 ![]() "For example, SKA will use the lightweight, stiff dishes we see at MeerKAT, but these will be larger and have a more precise pointing area to give you performance at a higher frequency band. "Many of SKA's new capabilities are actually extrapolations of existing technologies," says McMullin. The Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) is one of SKA's precursor telescopes and is operated by CSIRO. And at the same time, the Murchison Widefield Array, with its 256 low-frequency antenna tiles, and the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), comprising 36 parabolic antennas, are acting as precursors to SKA-Low in Australia. For example, a 64-dish radio telescope array called MeerKAT, in South Africa's Karoo region, will carry out ground-breaking science just ahead of SKA. " will enable physics exploration spanning the Epoch of Reionization, when the first luminous structures were born, as well as gravity and general relativity, through pulsars at the higher frequencies," highlights Joe McMullin, deputy director general and program director of the SKA Organisation, and based at the Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre, United Kingdom.Ĭritically, each site is already home to ‘precursor' telescopes that have fed into SKA's final design. Meanwhile, the dishes across Africa, called the ‘SKA-Mid' array, will monitor 350 MHz to 14 GHz frequencies. The low-frequency antennas in Australia-what is called the ‘SKA-Low' array-will cover 50 MHz to 350 MHz frequencies. Importantly, the array also has a massive frequency range of 50 MHz to 14 GHz, which will allow it to tackle a remarkably broad range of science. Once connected via fiber-optic networks to work as a single virtual telescope, its many dishes and antennas will have a vast collecting area-yes, one square kilometre-that will enable SKA to probe the Universe in unprecedented detail. Not surprisingly, SKA is stretching the principle of radio interferometry to the limit. Once complete, SKA will be able to survey the sky 10,000 times faster than any existing radio telescope array. Then, the second phase will include up to one million low-frequency antennas in Australia and some 2,000 radio dishes across all of Africa. The entire telescope will be built in two stages, with the first phase including 197 radio dishes in South Africa and some 130,000 low-frequency antennas in Western Australia. Without a doubt, SKA is set to be radio astronomy on steroids. The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). But the fact that we have needed the world's biggest supercomputer to run this test shows our needs exist at the very edge of what today's supercomputers can deliver." "And completing this has told us that we can deal with the data from SKA when it comes online in the next decade. ![]() "We've learned a lot of lessons from the trial, including how to optimize data transfer," says Wicenec. ![]() Why? To check that the world's biggest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will, once built, be able to handle the deluge of astronomical data it will generate. A mighty 400 gigabytes of data were processed every single second, equivalent to streaming more than 1,600 hours of standard definition YouTube videos a second.Īt the time, Professor Andreas Wicenec, director of data intensive astronomy at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said this was the first time astronomy data had been processed on this scale. Late last year, an international team of researchers used the world's most powerful supercomputer-Summit-to process simulated observations of the early Universe.
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