SKA, world's largest radio telescope, will be headquartered in the UK | Hacker News Reader

SKA, world's largest radio telescope, will be headquartered in the UK

wired.co.uk

42 pointswglb23 comments

Mildly misleading title there; the dishes are all in the southern hemisphere IIRC.

That said, Jodrell Bank is a very interesting place. Good article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/geeks_guide_jodrell_...

It should be 'headquartered'. The UK isn't physically big enough to host such an array, of course.

Not to mention weather...

How much effect does weather have on radio telescopes?

We don't have many very strong winds (at least, I don't think so) and the rest has (I think) little impact. Am Iissing something?

Rain clouds and radio don't mix well. That's why weather stations use radar (radio) to detect clouds.

Radio interference from man made sources is the biggest issue for radio telescopes in the traditional radio band. So it's not really the weather that decides, but the crappy radio skies of the UK.

A tad misleading. It's "based" in the UK, but all the actual antennas are in South Africa and Australia.

I'm looking forward to the results from this monster. You can't get much bigger than this without soon leaving the planet.

That's a pity. From what I read, the Padova, Italy bid was better in several ways, so it came down to politics. Apparently, the UK threatened to pull out of the project entirely if their candidate was not chosen.

http://italy.skatelescope.org/2015/03/13/informazioni-sulla-... (Italian)

I'm a bit biased myself, living in Padova, but it's objectively a pretty good place for something like this, just like it was a good place for Galileo in his day.

Why do you think the Italy bid was better out of interest?

Current systems for handling data would be unable to cope with the demands of the SKA and it is hoped technology will catch up by the time it is completed.

You’ve got to love optimistic engineering!

It worked for the LHC - http://wlcg-public.web.cern.ch/about

Not the first time it's been done.

Of course, it's only worked some of the time it's been done, I guess.

The part that needs the most optimism is the provision of the connectivity to the section in South Africa, which is unfortunately a political challenge instead of an engineering challenge.

Relying on Moore's law-like as caling is becoming standard practice in big science. Someday it'll stop working, but there's plentry of evidence to suggest that tooling will continue to improve on timescales of a decade.

Several of my friends worked on the bid for south africa and the volume of data they they were talking about is astounding. Another friend of mine is working on the forked nix os that they are building to run all this, very very interesting,lots of interesting computing. Lots of phd and post doc CS and EE work being done around this in South Africa.

Interestingly the algo which they use to process the data is very simple, several nested loops (trying to find the paper now one of my friends on the project sent me yielded no results), but this algo obivously has to run on masses of data and massively parallel.

How much data is going to be generated from this and will it be publicly available?

Would be nice if they made a nice data API like NASA has.

https://data.nasa.gov/developer

How much data? Well, data rates have the potential to be multiple petabytes per second. The main concern is gathering, transmitting, filtering, processing, and storing this data (or enough of it) quickly enough while staying within budget.

What would you do with the data?

Unsupervised Learning Algorithm would be fun.

> and will it be publicly available?

Yes, though I do not know where/how, yet.

It's worth noting that data from existing radio telescopes are freely available. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US operates an archive for their telescopes[0] as does the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array[1], the Australia Telescope Compact Array[2], the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope[3], and many others. Note however that much/most of this data is not the final data products but is raw and/or semi-calibrated.

[0] http://archive.nrao.edu/

[1] https://almascience.nrao.edu/alma-data/archive

[2] http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/observing/archive_requests...

[3] https://www.astron.nl/wsrt-archive/php/

This is Madness!

All the people downvoting you have Bad Manners :D.

This is great. Yeah. The power of Technology !!!

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