Australia’s leading scientific organisation CSIRO will take on a new leading role in the development of a telescope made of thousands of dishes and millions of radio wave receptors antennas that will optimise research in scientific fields such as astrophysics, cosmology and astrobiology in the near future.
The telescope is aptly named the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) as the antennas will have a collecting zone of one square kilometer.
CSIRO will play a lead role in the next stage of development of the SKA, as it is responsible for the design work relating to the dishes and receptors known as the Phased Array Feeds (PAFs).
“The SKA is an international project, with global scale and huge scientific ambition,” Chief of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science Dr Lewis Ball said.
“CSIRO’s considerable expertise in the field of radio astronomy means we can make a real contribution to one of this century’s most exciting scientific projects.”
Dr Ball also highlighted the benefits of CSIRO’s innovative PAF technology which is currently being developed for use with its Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, as well as for use with the future SKA.
“PAFs give astronomers the opportunity to view a large part of the sky all at once and can transform sky survey speeds by more than a factor of twenty when compared to traditional receiver technologies,” he said.
“This ground-breaking technology will truly revolutionize the field of radio astronomy.”
Additionally, the organisation is involved in several other SKA associations including those designing the telescope control system and the telescope’s signal processing and data transport functions.
The project will receive $9 million funding from the Australian federal government.
Construction of the first phase of the SKA will begin in 2018, with work on a second phase planned to begin in the early 2020s.
When completed, the SKA is estimated to operate a thousand times faster than the best present day instruments.
It will allow research into giant gas clouds, black holes, magnetic fields, as well as distant galaxies and will address a wide range of fundamental questions in an array of scientific fields.
