In an article entitled "Australia in last-ditch bid for telescope", Sydney Morning Herald
reporter Stephen Cauchi reports on a four person delegation lead by Brian Boyle
making a final pitch in London last month for Australia and New Zealand to be the
home for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).
See -
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci...107-1ppf9.html
The SKA consortium lists some of the site selection criteria that are taken into
account as -
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Originally Posted by skatelescope.org
Radio frequency interference from mobile phones, TVs, radios and other electrical devices.
The characteristics of the ionosphere (the upper part of the Earth’s atmosphere) and the troposphere (the lower part of the Earth’s atmosphere).
Physical characteristics of the site including climate and subsurface temperatures.
Connectivity across the vast extent of the telescope itself as well as to communications networks for worldwide distribution of data produced by the SKA.
Infrastructure costs, including power supply and distribution.
Operations and maintenance costs.
The long term sustainability of the site as a radio quiet zone.
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The Australian and New Zealand case is strong -
http://www.skatelescope.org/the-site...ralia-zealand/
but so too is that of the South Africans, with the proposal that the core of the
antennae be placed on the Karoo plateau with other antennae located in
Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius, Zambia, Kenya and Ghana.
http://www.skatelescope.org/the-sites/southern-africa/
The SKA Australia web site is here -
http://www.ska.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx
The SKA Africa web site is here -
http://www.ska.ac.za
The SKA project will produce a mind-boggling collection of engineering
statistics, including that it is projected to require the computer processing
power equivalent of one billion modern PC's.
The networking requirements represent what the SKA consortium describe as -
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Originally Posted by skatelescope.org
the largest and most challenging network system in science. Approximately 160 Gigabits (10**9) per second of data will be transmitted from each radio dish to a central processor meaning that the dishes alone will produce ten times the current global internet traffic! The use of aperture array receptors will further increase data rates to many Petabits (10**15) per second which represents more than 100 times the current global internet traffic!
The physical network infrastructure will primarily use optical fibre cable.
The huge distances that the spiral SKA configuration will span means that the SKA will need enormous quantities of optical fibre, enough in fact, to wrap twice around the Earth!
The processed data from the SKA telescope will be used by an international community of astronomers who will require connections to the high performance computing facility and archive. This connectivity will be limited by that available on international routes, but there is a desire to reach hundreds of Gigabits per second.
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See
http://www.skatelescope.org/the-tech...al-processing/