(MENAFN- Asia Times) construction of what will be the world's largest radio telescope arrays is finally under way in South Africa and Australia more than 30 years after the project was first proposed.
Scheduled for completion by 2030, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO) will scan the universe to investigate phenomena ranging from the appearance of the first stars and the creation of galaxies to gravitational distortions of space-time, cosmic magnetic fields, black holes and the formation of Earth-like planets.
Sarah Pearce, SKAO telescope director in Australia, told the press,“The SKA telescopes will be sensitive enough to detect an airport radar on a planet circling a star tens of light-years away, so may even answer the biggest question of all: Are we alone in the universe?”
Events celebrating the start of construction were held in the South Africa's Northern Cape province and Western Australia on December 5.
The SKA Observatory is an intergovernmental organization similar in form to CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the European Space Agency. Headquartered in Jodrell Bank near Manchester, England, it is responsible for constructing and operating the radio telescope arrays in Australia and South Africa.
The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics of the University of Manchester is one of the world's leading centers of radio astronomy. The Jodrell Bank Observatory operates eMERLIN (enhanced Multi Element Remotely Linked Interferometer Network), the UK's national radio telescope facility.
The SKA headquarters at Jodrell Bank, England, with the Lovell Telescope in the background. Photo: Wikipedia / Mike Pool
The Square Kilometer Array Observatory traces its history back to the 1980s, when astronomers began to develop the concept of a radio telescope array big enough“to be able to see back to the Cosmic Dawn, when the very first stars formed in a universe that was only 100 million years old; to study the epoch of galaxy formation at 1 billion years of age; and to truly understand the current epoch of accelerating expansion, 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang, driven by the as yet unexplained force of Dark Energy.”
How big is big enough?“The surprising answer is that any one of these tasks would independently require a telescope with a collecting area approaching one square kilometer (1 million square meters).”
By 2005, scientists and engineers had identified the most promising technologies for the SKA and produced a reference design. Committees were formed, agreements were signed and three potential sites for the telescopes were identified – southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
The SKA Organization was created in 2011 to finalize the site selection and design, and establish a governance structure. South Africa and Australia were chosen as the telescope sites in 2012, international design consortia were established in 2013, and Jodrell Bank was made the permanent headquarters in 2015.
That same year, negotiations were begun to establish the SKA Observatory as a legally constituted inter-governmental organization. Four years later, in March 2019, the SKAO Convention treaty was signed in Rome by representatives of Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
These seven countries were the founding partners. Switzerland joined them as a full member in January this year. Eight other countries associated with the project – Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Sweden – are prospective members.
Eight other African countries – Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia – are involved in the project with a view toward its future expansion in Africa. Local indigenous peoples are also involved: the San in South Africa and the Wajarri Yamaji in Australia.
The SKA Observatory came into legal existence in January 2021 after ratification by the three host nations (the UK, South Africa and Australia) plus Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal. China ratified the Convention in June 2021 and Switzerland in January 2022.
The US dropped out of the project after the National Science Foundation cut off funding in late 2011. At the time, this was lamented by the British scientific journal Nature in an editorial titled“The United States must rejoin the SKA,” in which it wrote that“its absence threatens to hinder the SKA's pursuit of its scientific goals.”
In retrospect, however, if the US had not dropped out but had instead become a full member of the organization, it seems quite likely that by now it would have tried to expel China or limit its participation, putting political goals ahead of scientific goals and turning an exercise in international cooperation into another battlefield of the new cold war.
As it is, the SKA Observatory demonstrates that former prime minister Boris Johnson's concept of Global Britain still has some life in it. It also recalls Winston Churchill's statement“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
New Zealand dropped out in 2019, questioning the project's delays and rising costs versus potential benefits. Of course, it had been passed over as a site for part of the telescope arrays.
South Africa and Australia will divide responsibility for covering radio-frequency ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. The SKA-Mid array in the Karoo desert of the Northern Cape will cover the middle frequency range from 350 megahertz to 15.4 gigahertz with 197 fully steerable parabolic dish antennas, each measuring 13.5 or 15 meters in diameter and standing more than 22 meters in height.
The SKA-Low array in Western Australia north of Perth will cover the low-frequency range from 50MHz to 350MHz with 131,072 fixed directional dipole antennas 2 meters in height that remind some people of Christmas trees. The arrays will be many times more sensitive and able to gather data much faster than existing radio telescopes.
Those interested in technical detail can find it here on the SKA Observatory website.
The arrays will generate an enormous amount of data, a prospect that led the SKA Organization to sign an agreement with CERN in 2017 to cooperate in extreme-scale computing.
This was followed by an agreement between the SKA Observatory and CERN, GÉANT (the pan-European network and services provider for research and education) and PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) to cooperate in the application of high-performance computing to large data-intensive science projects.
The purpose of the agreement was explained as follows:
According to SKA Observatory director general Philip Diamond,“With the sheer quantity of data that will flow from the SKA antennas towards two supercomputing centers, one in Australia and one in South Africa, developments in high-performance computing and high-speed networks will be key for the SKA Observatory.”
The SKA Observatory will therefore make major contributions not only to astronomy but to computing – and to economic development. It is reported that contracts for equipment, construction and other services valued at about €500 million have already been awarded.
Director Pearce believes that the SKA Observatory will“define the next 50 years for radio astronomy, charting the birth and death of galaxies, searching for new types of gravitational waves and expanding the boundaries of what we know about the universe.”
It should complement the research programs of the james webb space telescope , the first stunning images from which were released in July.
It should also help spread science and technology around the world, having a particularly large impact on southern Africa and Western Australia, and countering trends toward political polarization.
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