[Adelastro1 (Wayne England)]

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!