Newcastle Astronomical Society Meeting
Friday 3rd June 2011
"SKA The World's BIGGEST Telescope"
with
Dr Michael Burton
University of Newcastle GP2.1
7.30pm-9pm
Decision on where the telescope will be built – either in Australia and New Zealand or South Africa – will be made early 2012.
The proposed radio telescope will consist of some 3000 dishes spread over a wide area, and promises to be 10,000 times faster than current technology, worth at around A$2 billion
The
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a radio telescope in development which will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre. It will operate over a wide range of frequencies and its size will make it 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument. It will require very high performance central computing engines and long-haul links with a capacity greater than the current global Internet traffic. It will be able to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than ever before. With receiving stations extending out to distance of 3,000 km from a concentrated central core, it will continue radio astronomy's tradition of providing the highest resolution images in all astronomy. The SKA will be built in the southern hemisphere, either in South Africa or Australia, where the view of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is best and radio interference least. Construction of the SKA is scheduled to begin in 2016 for initial observations by 2019 and full operation by 2024
www.nas.org.au
