Some of the prototype designs for the aerials are currently being made by a bloke called Pete, in the room next to me. He keeps his bike locked to a table and it gets in everyone's way, so we let his tyres down occasionally. They don't tell you that sort of thing in articles like this.
"The telescope will be perhaps 10,000 times more powerful than any we currently have"<p>"Right now we can spot planets circling around distant stars. The SKA will be able to spot the equivalent of an airport radar system on one of those very, very distant planets."<p>"visitors must be prepared for, scheduled in and accounted for when looking at the data this place produces. Long before you get to Boolardy, the 346,000-hectare pastoral station on which the Murchison observatory stands, the radio-quiet restrictions start. Anyone approaching is asked to turn off all electronic devices."<p>Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them. I'm glad the Australian government is getting behind something like this and look forward to seeing what they uncover.<p>On a side note, the actual writing of the article irked me a bit as the reporter is clearly non-technical, and when I saw Moores overquoted Law get a mention it did make me reconsider the accuracy of other statements made by the writer.
The technical challenges posed by the SKA really are astoundingly huge. The data generated by these dishes will require much higher data throuput than even the fastest optical links between CERN and its tier 1 sites (40 Gb/s), and they will be in the middle of a remote desert. Then there is the scale of compute and storage needed to analyse the data, which would be totally unfeasible with the tech we have today. It's an exciting time to be working in scientific computing!!
So excited that this is happening in my backyard :)<p>FYI, there are quite a few openings to support the SKA:<p><a href="http://www.seek.com.au/jobs/in-wa/#keywords=csiro&location=3107" rel="nofollow">http://www.seek.com.au/jobs/in-wa/#keywords=csiro&location=3...</a><p><pre><code> 1. Service Manager, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
2. Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory (MRO) Support Officer
3. Senior Software Engineer / Architect
4. Head of Supercomputing
5. Australia Telescope National Facility (ANTF) Head of Engineering Operations</code></pre>
They have some interesting stuff in their GitHub repo: <a href="https://github.com/ska-sa" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ska-sa</a><p>Slides about one of the projects to assist scientists with simulations: <a href="https://speakerdeck.com/gijzelaerr/rodrigues" rel="nofollow">https://speakerdeck.com/gijzelaerr/rodrigues</a> (Gijs gave the talk yesterday at the Python Amsterdam Meetup)
There was discussion here a few weeks back about the US National Radio Quiet Zone which folks may be interested in as well:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569718" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569718</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...</a>
Could someone with some knowledge please elaborate on the potential implications on a project such as this, for example, if we found ourselves with clusters of low earth satellites streaming high-bandwith internet to the entire planet?