Square Kilometer Array (SKA) decision timetable - a waiting game

[gary]

Many readers will be interested in knowing what day the site selection decision for
the Square Kilometer Array will be announced.

The short answer is that the general public will probably have to wait until
March/April 2012.

Some light is shed on this by the Briefing Notes for the Meeting of the SKA Board of
Directors which took place on 18 Jan 2012.
See http://www.skatelescope.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/SKA-BD-02_Meeting.Notes_1.pdf

In summary -

* 7 Feb 2012 - The SKA Siting Group (SSG) was to receive the report and recommendation
of the SKA Site Advisory (SSAC). As this information is confidential, one can
only assume that this event has taken place.

* 15 Feb 2012 - The SSG was to meet and transmit the SSAC's report and
recommendation, together with its own comments on the site evaluation
process, to the SKA Board of Directors.

* 22 Feb 2012 - The Board will meet to discuss the report and recommendation.
If the Board is satisfied that the agreed evaluation process has been followed, it will
convene a General Meeting of Members.

* No date appears to have been announced for such a General Meeting,
but a deadlock mechanism for the site selection process has already been
approved which would come into effect if it is not possible to reach a
unanimous decision on a site resolution. At the General Meeting, Members
will be invited to consider the SSAC report and recommendation and further
negotiation will take place.

* No date appears to have been announced but another General Meeting
will then take place for a vote.

* If no agreement is reached, two to six weeks later, the deadlock mechanism will
be invoked.

As Brian Boyle is a Board Director, in theory he should know by now
but he has made clear that this information will be confidential for some time.
In a Tweet yesterday, Brian said he still did not know.

Brian has indicated that the general public should learn of the decision some time
in March/April.

To date, the Australian Government has invested over $300 million in the project.
$152 million for the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder project (ASKAP).
See http://www.atnf.csiro.au/projects/askap/
$10 million for the Murchison Wide Field Array
See http://www.mwatelescope.org/
$80 million for the Pawsey Supercomputing Center
See http://www.ivec.org/Supercomputing/Pawsey_Supercomputing_Centre
$25 million for the Perth to Geraldton NBN optical fiber link
See http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/347551/perth_geraldton_fibre_roll_begins/
$50 million on green power for the sites.
See http://www.sciencewa.net.au/3388-from-green-power-to-dark-matter.html
The West Australian Government has also invested $10.8 million into the Pawsey
Center.

A successful bid would attract $2.1 billion of investment from overseas.
If the Australian bid is successful, the computer infrastructure in the Pawsey Center
in WA alone would make it one of the most powerful computer systems on the planet
processing at any instant what is estimated to be the equivalent to ten times
the entire Internet data traffic. By comparison, it makes the computing
requirement of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) seem small so winning the
bid would be a huge shot in the arm for the Australian IT and communications
industries.

Follow Dr Brian Boyle on Twitter here -
http://twitter.com/#!/brianboyleska :thumbsup:

[mswhin63]

Thanks for the update Gary

[Bassnut]

I don't understand how the gov can spend 300mil on a hope. Is all that money wasted if we lose?. Is the infrastructure built so far usefull on its own?.

[AndrewJ]

We ( as a state ) spent 5 times that on a hope ( read transport ticket system )
so 300 mill for the country is petty change.
If it sounds good and uses computers,
( and involves a possible photo shoot in the outback )
they will pay anything.

Andrew

[Bassnut]

It's funny, I saw a live presentation on the oz bid. It was presented as a done deal. Any question on ".......but we haven't actually got it yet....right?" returned a quizzical don't-understand gaze.

Andrew, yes, the PR alone was probably worth 300mill, ........to the gov.

I'm all for the fastest PC in the world gear and fancy pics, but sheesh, that's an expensive "pre bid".

[gary]

The plan is that ASKAP (36 antennae x 12m ) will be a world-leading telescope
in its own right. The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) will consist if 2048
dual polarized dipole antennae listening at 80-300MHz and will also be a powerful
instrument in its own right.

So if Australia is unsuccessful in its bid, then we will still have two new powerful state-of-the-art telescopes.

It is not lost on the South Africans the opportunities that come about in winning the
bid and they too have invested heavily in their attempt to secure it, including beginning
construction of the precursor Karoo Array telescope, which is known as MeerKAT.
It will be the world's largest radio telescope before the SKA is built.

As far back as 2004, the South African government decided to increase the
number of PhD and MSc graduates in radio astronomy. Whenever I have had
the opportunity to ask an Australian astronomer about the SKA, they have
nothing but admiration for their South African colleagues and the consensus,
even in Govt. is that the bid could easily go either way.

But to be a player at the table, the ante is high. And both South Africa and Australia
have thrown in their antes and both have strong hands.

[Bassnut]

Whew, that's all good then, please proceed !.

[JB80]

Thanks for the update and good luck for the winning bid. Also thanks for the links too. It would be great to see Australia take a leading role if given the opportunity.

It could be worse I guess, you could already have the investment in and then get the plug pulled by an unreliable partner as what has happenned to the Europeans.

[gary]

As a couple of postscripts to the original post -

1) In a tweet from Brian Boyle today, 18th Feb 2012, "Report of SKA Site Advisory Committee now sent to SKA Board".

2) Sydney Morning Herald story by Bridie Smith today, "Last-ditch push for $2.5bn radio telescope deal".


Story here -
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/lastditch-push-for-25bn-radio-telescope-deal-20120217-1ter4.html

In a tweet by Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt on 14 Feb, he mentions he
had "An impressive 'light' 7-course lunch at the Chinese Embassy with
Brian Boyle. Brian Boyle responded that it was "called eating for your country".
Who could ask for two better ambassadors for science?

[Jules76]

It should also be pointed out that the $25m to build the fibre optic link from Perth to Geraldton was going to be spent anyway as part of the NBN. It's just been prioritised to help boost the bid.

[Benno18]

Well as long as Julia Gillard does not get involved, ergo the soccer world cup bid, we should be all good!!!!

[gary]

Ben (Benno18),

Just a reminder of the forum's Terms of Service, specifically Section 3.
See http://www.iceinspace.com.au/tos.html



Best Regards

Gary Kopff
Mount Kuring-Gai

[Benno18]

good call Gary
Sorry if offended
Benno

[Terry B]

Is there any word on this decision yet. Originally it was to be announced on 29/2

[gary]

Hi Terry,

Brian Boyle has indicated in a Twiiter today that "April 4 is the date of the next SKA Members
meeting when a vote on the site decision could be taken."

We know that the report of the site selection committee is in, but as board member,
Brian is maintaining confidentiality.

China, Italy, the UK and the Netherlands are the votes that count in the end.

[Terry B]

Not good news.
http://m.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/australian-bid-falters-for-25b-telescope-20120309-1upsp.html

[spacezebra]

Thanks for the update, looks very close...and more waiting....

Cheers Petra d.

[astronut]

It has nothing to do with "Who has the best Bid or site"..it has all to do with politics!!
Let me see if I can explain Australia's situation using physics.
What would you be if you were attached to another object by an incline plane, wrapped helicly around an axis.

"Screwed.".....my two cents..

[Octane]

Nice one, John. TBBT is great. :D

H

[mswhin63]

It is a strange report really,
Firstly it was a scientific panel not a political panel.
Secondly the panel discussion are confidential. So how the hell did the news get a hold of it, were they part of the meeting?

Or is it another media sensationalism. There are no direct references from the panel discussion. I think we see so many assumptions made by the media that scientific community can't trust them, yet the majority non scientific community do trust what is said. No wonder science is taken a nose dive in community trust.

Personally the media assumed what happened because the Minister didn't give them what they wanted.

[Shark Bait]

I saw an interview the Minister on the TV a few days ago. I cannot quote him word for word, but he said we should be 'realistic' about our chances of winning the bid in light of the economic development that this project would bring to the African Nations involved.

He did not sound that confident to me. Enthusiasm is not one of his strengths either. Maybe he already knows the outcome?

I am still hoping that Australia wins the bid.

[Visionoz]

Wouldn't surprise me at all if Australia lost out on this one either! Somehow ugly politics gets in the way all the time, wonder why?

Cheers
Bill

[gary]

Since the Site Advisory Committee report is currently confidential, one can assume by the
Daniel Flitton article in today's Sydney Morning Herald that he was privy to a leak.

Nature has picked up on the report and says -


Nature article here -
http://www.nature.com/news/south-africa-wins-science-panel-s-backing-to-host-ska-telescope-1.10205

An article that appeared on the Chinese Xinhua News Agency on 22 Feb 2012,
several days after the Site Advisory Committee report was submitted to the
SKA Board is possibly telling.





So it might be construed that the African nations were confident enough of the
Site Advisory Committee report as far back as 22 Feb 2012 that they were
willing to send out the message that the voting nations should abide by
its recommendations.

That article in full here -
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-02/22/c_131425451.htm

The Murchison site in Australia is at an elevation of 460m and the Karoo site in
South Africa is at an elevation of 1000m.

The phase and amplitude of the signals arriving from space are affected by
the ionosphere and the troposphere.

In particular, for the operating frequencies up to 10GHz, the characterization
of the troposphere at the locations was deemed to be highly relevant.
In particular, phase fluctuations introduced by precipitable water vapour have
an impact.

The SKA Developmental Office at the University of Manchester in conjunction
with JPL built a pair of systems to help measure the tropospheric conditions
at each site. Each system consisted of a pair of 1m antennas over a 200m
baseline pointing at a geostationary satellite.

The systems were delivered to each site in the first week of 2011 and have
supposedly been running from about March 2011 to gather statistical data.
See http://www.skatelescope.org/public/2011-02_System_delta_CoDR_Documents/20-WP3-040.020.000-R-001-2_TropoCharac.pdf

When the Site Selection Committee report is made public, it will be interesting
to see the results of this particular test.

Murchison received 247.1mm of rain in 2011, slightly above the mean of 241mm.

If Australia is unsuccessful in its bid to host the SKA, one should be mindful that
Australia is still part of the international consortium involved in it.

Nevertheless, it will be a huge blow to astronomy in Australia if we are not successful
as the nation to host it and the long term ramifications will be very significant.

The only hope now for Australia is what Nature's source reports is that it was a close call
and that the final vote goes Australia's way. As Nature reports -



With the initial project cost of $2.5 billion and an operational cost of about $25 billion
over 50 years, the relativities of the Aussie Dollar to the Euro and Pound will not
have been helping Australia's pitch to the Europeans. (See graphs below).
The irony of course, is that the high dollar is being partially driven from demand
from China for resources out of states such as WA - the very state the SKA plans
to be hosted in.

[Terry B]

Interesting Gary.
So who is in the know at SMH and how accurate?

[gary]

Hi Terry,

Journalist Daniel Flitton's profile appears here in The Age -
http://about.theage.com.au/view_profile.php?intid=1469

A Fulbright Scholar, a former university lecturer in international relations and a
former government intelligence analyst, one might reasonably expect that Flitton
has established a wide range of sources over the years.

The Nature article source corroborates the claim but qualifies it as being a close call.

The Chinese press article of 22 Feb 2012 raises the speculation that the South African
government was aware of the site recommendation and hence emboldened them to play the
card that says "the agreed process must follow its course".

[gary]

SKA members (Australia, Canada, China, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa,
The Netherlands and the United Kingdom) are meeting at this moment in Amsterdam.

On March 19th, the SKA Board agreed to pass on the site recommendation to
the members.

According to a note from the Chair -



The SKA Board will then meet April 4th (i.e. later today Australian time).

In other related news, IBM and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
(ASTRON) have teamed in a 32.9 million Euro, five year initiative named DOME,
which is exploring computer architectures to handle the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
bytes a day of data the SKA will produce. That is more than twice the amount
of data that is transferred over the entire Internet everyday and more than 100 times
the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

A computer system that can handle this much information has never been
built.

Wired magazine are reporting that the DOME team are looking into aspects such
as three-dimensional chip stacking.
See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/what-to-do-with-1000000000000000000-bytes-of-astronomical-data-per-day/

As it is with the massive data centers that power sites such as Google, an enormous
part of the computing problem for the SKA will be thermodynamics, that is dealing
with the enormous amount of heat that is produced by such an enormous number
of computers.

So what is in it for IBM? As Wired reports -


One thing is for sure. Information has become the currency of the 21st Century.

[gary]

As a footnote to my previous post ...

This morning's Australian is running with this story by Leigh Dayton on the meeting that is taking place -
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/d-day-on-horizon-for-site-of-worlds-largest-space-telescope/story-e6frg8y6-1226317968580

We may expect a communique in the coming hours but as Brian Boyle points out, "Australia and New Zealand are still
very much in discussions and negotiations with the board and the members".

And one can expect the Africans are too.

[Octane]

That DOME project sounds insane!

Fingers-crossed for a positive outcome for Australia!

H

[sheeny]

Shades of Deep Thought!:P

Al.

[Liz]

They are talking about it tonight on 'The Project'. :thumbsup:

[jebediah]

Not a bad story, but can you believe the hosts of The Project said, "give it to South Africa, they need the money"??

[gary]

According to an article today by John Yeld in the South African newspaper, The Star -



Article here -
http://www.iol.co.za/the-star/ska-would-be-a-boon-for-africa-says-pandor-1.1269977

[gary]

The following news item has just appeared on the official skatelescope.org web site -



http://www.skatelescope.org/news/ska-members-meet-discuss-site-selection/

The key sentence is "They noted that it is important to maximise the value from the investments made by both candidate host regions."

[AstralTraveller]

So, they are going to share it? :shrug: If it is technically possible they could wind up with a baseline from NZ to SA. But where will the computing centre be?

[gary]

Hi David,

The original SKA architecture called for a 5km central core of antennas, a further mid-region
of a smaller number of dishes extending out 180km and then five spiral arms with dishes
spaced logarithmically out to 3000km.

Firstly keep in mind that in order to be useful, stations at the furthest distance
from the core need to have the target above the horizon.

Since the hour angle between West Australia and South Africa is approximately
six and three quarter hours, if the core was in one country and a long
baseline station in the other, targets would either have to be circumpolar
from both sites or have an appropriate range of limited zenith distances.
Keep in mind it is some 8500km between the two sites, much longer than
the original baseline proposal.

Secondly, the amount of data produced by the core is astronomical, exceeding the
current entire world internet traffic. This is sent by dedicated optical cables in trenches
to the on-site correlator. It is then distilled down where it is transferred to
the data center but still the amount of data is enormous.

In the Australian proposal, longer baseline stations will use fibres leased from the
NBN, possibly dark fibre. An optical fibre link to New Zealand would also be leased.

So in a nutshell, because of the enormous amount of data involved, the computing
center will need to be located in the same country as the core.

If one country was to act as a long baseline site for the other, dark fibre would
need to be leased connecting the countries. If it is available, it would be expensive,
as it is leased by the km.

Based on current trends, global internet traffic is presently increasing about 100 fold
every 12 years. One of the hopes therefore is that over the timescale of the SKA
construction, a leased dark fibre between the two countries may become less expensive
in relative terms.

However, whichever country the core is sited will also host the main computing
center and they will be fortunate indeed as they will be hosting the most powerful
purpose-built data handling system in existence.

Information is already one of the most important commodities of the 21st Century.
Those countries that fully embrace information and communications technologies
will have a large competitive edge over those that don't and exposure to a system
such as that proposed for the SKA could have enormous spin-offs.

But at the end of the day, it is all about the best science outcome and that is what
the new working group would have been charged with to investigate.

[astroron]

Mind Boggling stuff Gary:eyepop:
Thanks for keeping us informed,
and most of all for explaining it so easily.:thanx:
Cheers :thumbsup:

[gary]

Photos
Brian Boyle has provided a link to a photo by Barry Turner which shows
a recent aerial shot of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) including
thirteen Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) antennas in
various stages of construction.

All 35 antennas are planned to be on site by the end of April 2012.

Great shot -
http://twitter.com/#!/BrianBoyleSKA/status/187751055038230528/photo/1/large

In this photo taken by Ross Forsyth, zebra finches are perched in a tree
next to one of the new antennas.
http://twitter.com/#!/BrianBoyleSKA/status/187756417837576192/photo/1/large

First science papers
Brian has also indicated on Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/brianboyleska) that the first science papers from the MRO
are emerging such as this one entitled "Low Frequency Imaging of Fields at High
Galactic Latitude with the Murchison Widefield Array 32-Element Prototype".

See -
http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5790

Australian Govt welcomes appointment of new siting option working group decision
A 5th April 2012 media release by Science Minister, Chris Evans, appears here (http://minister.innovation.gov.au/chrisevans/mediareleases/pages/scienceworkinggroupsetuptoaidskasit edecision.aspx)
stating that the said "the Government welcomed the decision to appoint a working group
of suitably qualified scientific advisers to further examine siting options for the project."

See -
http://minister.innovation.gov.au/chrisevans/mediareleases/pages/scienceworkinggroupsetuptoaidskasit edecision.aspx

Nature reports on split site proposal
In this April 10th 2012 article by Geoff Brumfiel (http://www.nature.com/news/giant-telescope-may-get-two-homes-1.10404) that appeared in Nature, some
astronomers, such as Heino Falcke from Radboud University in the Netherlands
are proposing "to divide the project by placing the higher-frequency dishes on
one continent and the lower-frequency antennas on the other."



Article here -
http://www.nature.com/news/giant-telescope-may-get-two-homes-1.10404

[gary]

Brian Boyle has posted a recent nice snapshot showing engineers traveling back
and forth on motor bikes fitted with trailers between the ASKAP antennas at Murchison.
Shot here -
http://twitter.com/#!/BrianBoyleSKA/status/193543329080807424/photo/1/large

[Adelastro1]

Just been to a fascinating talk at the ASSA monthly general meeting by Dr Carole Jackson, Business Development Manager for CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science (CASS) where she spoke mainly of the ASKAP but also the SKA. The ASKAP looks amazing and it's great to see that we can build something of that scientific calibre in this country. It's mind boggling how much data will be received and the processing power required just for the 30 odd telescopes being built let alone the 3000 for the SKA. For ASKAP, 2 terra bytes of data per second per telescope will be produced! The 87th fastest super computer will be built to process it all! ASKAP will look at 30sq deg at any one time using new Australian designed detector arrays at the scopes focal point. I think from memory about $150m has been spent on the telescopes with another $250m on infrastructure at the Murchison site. How much more do we need to show that we can build the SKA successfully! We've shown how to build it and what needs to be done to solve the problems, the best detectors and fibre optic network (NBN), and we have the best site (for scientific research) in the world. Unfortunately there's politics...

Dr Jackson said the earliest that the final site announcement for the SKA will be made is the end of this month (there's a meeting in the Netherlands) and hopefully the latest will be July. So not long to go!