Australia designs local infrastructure for world’s largest telescope
CANBERRA: A team of Australian engineers and scientists has designed the local infrastructure for the world’s largest radio telescope – the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – taking the billion-dollar global project one step closer to reality.
The SKA will explore the Universe in unprecedented detail, doing so hundreds of times faster than any current facility.
Antennas will be located in both Australia and southern Africa.
The SKA Infrastructure Australia consortium, led by CSIRO – Australia’s national science agency – and industry partner Aurecon Australia, has designed everything from supercomputing facilities, buildings, site monitoring and roads, to the power and data fibre distribution that will be needed to host the instrument at CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in remote Western Australia.
The project has presented unique technical challenges.
“We’re setting the groundwork to host 132,000 low-frequency SKA antennas in Australia. These will receive staggering amounts of data,” CSIRO’s SKA Infrastructure Consortium Director, Antony Schinckel said.
“The data flows will be on the scale of petabits, or a million billion bits, per second – more than the global internet rate today, all flowing into a single building in the Murchison.
“To get this data from the antennas to the telescope’s custom supercomputing facilities we need to lay 65,000 fibre optic cables.”
CSIRO and Aurecon engineers drew on their experience working together on the infrastructure design for the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope, CSIRO’s 36dish radio telescope that is already operating at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.
Aurecon’s Senior Project Engineer, Shandip Abeywickrema, said the design team’s biggest challenge was minimising radio ‘noise’ created by the systems placed at the high-tech astronomy observatory.
This is essential to avoid drowning out the faint signals from space that the telescope is designed to detect.—