South Africa wins the SKA! And so does Australia.

[Humodour]

LOL. Can't say I didn't see it coming, but I guess political compromise has trumped scientific excellence.

 

It's not too bad. The quality of scientific research will actually be just as good, but the cost of splitting the SKA up (presumably by frequency since it has been stated that SA got 2 of 3 components - there were three frequency ranges and thus 3 types of arrays making up the whole) between the two countries is going to be maybe $300 million higher. That's actually not as much as I expected, so that's good.

 

I can see why they split the telescope - Australia and SA were essentially equivalent bids, SA was slightly favoured (due to higher elevations of the radio quiet zone), especially in terms of giving Africa a truly uplifting foreign aid project, but Australia lobbied incredibly fiercely for the SKA.

 

I know I'm an Aussie, but I was actually rooting for Africa to win. The SKA is one of the single best things you could do to improve the quality of life in Africa - gives people a purpose, makes people want an education in science so they can work on it, creates oh so many infrastructure and construction jobs, requires the training of bucket loads of computer scientists and engineers to maintain, requires the construction of a superfast fibre optic network, requires the construction of the world's fastest super computers, means billions of dollars spent on the local economy, and makes Africa an astronomy superhub.

 

I do like the 2:1 split solution. Us Aussies still get some awesome toys to play with and some incentive to keep training world-class astronomers. And from my perspective especially as a network engineer, it means there are still some decent job opportunities available with the SKA when I graduate. Maybe not as many as if we won the whole thing, but whatever.

 

More details: http://www.google.co...ab962dfe344297e

 

Background for those out of the loop

The SKA stands for "Square Kilometre Array". It is the world's largest telescope ever built by far. It will be between 50 to 100 times more powerful than any existing telescope. It is a distributed computing project involving IIRC around 3000 different telescopes at varying frequencies. These telescopes will be linked together by algorithms running on the world's fastest supercomputers to produce one supertelescope image.

 

The SKA is an interesting project because the supercomputing power required to run it is not expected to be invented until around 2020. Specifically, it requires at least exaflops of processing capacity to run.

 

The SKA is possibly a more important scientific project than even the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

 

The SKA is being built by the following countries:

Australia

New Zealand

South Africa

China

Italy

The United Kingdom

The Netherlands

 

India is looking at joining.

[Humodour]

Alright, so I found more info at the SKA website, and its probably also more accurate.

 

http://www.skatelescope.org/news/dual-site-agreed-square-kilometre-array-telescope/

 

Australia will be building the low frequency aperture array (lots of these things):

 

South Africa will be building the medium frequency aperture array (lots of these things):

 

South Africa will also be building the high frequency dish array (lots of these things):

[Humodour]

There is an even more detailed summary of the SKA split-bid decision and its scientific implications here at The Conversation (a news website run by Australia's universities and research centres): http://theconversation.edu.au/the-square-kilometre-array-finally-has-a-home-or-two-7274

 

Basically, Africa will study the nature of gravity. Australia will study the composition of the universe (dark energy, dark matter) and its origins.

 

It also occurs to me that one of the awesome long-term benefits of a split bid is that two of the world's few remaining decent radio quiet areas will now be locked in for preservation from mining and human encroachment for the next 40 years or so. Had either country won the whole bid, only one would have a real future of preservation.

 

Radio quiet areas are absolutely critical for radioastronomy. Long-term, we'll probably see more and more radioastronomy enter space to prevent interference from artificial EMR. But a project like the SKA just wouldn't be possible in space (as opposed to Earth) with humanity's current level of political will.

 

A better picture of the medium frequency aperture array Africa will be building:

 

Edited May 26, 2012 by Krezack

[Gorth]

I'm sure the Kiwis are going to be excited that you remembered to include them in the congratulations

 

Joking aside, it is an interesting project. I normally don't follow the news on observations (damn peeping toms), but when a project gets ambitious enough in scale, you know somebody somewhere is serious about taking a look at something. Knowledge of the universe is key to "conquering" it.

[Humodour]

Whoops, forgot about the New Zealand!

 

Something I only just discovered is that the SKA will also be used to track the movements of the Earth's tectonic plates (or any other type of geodesy we might be interested in) with extreme (millimetre) precision by using the locations of black holes* as extremely stable reference points. Apparently the Kiwis are very keen on this, which is understandable since they live on a fault line, and we've all seen what keeps happening in Christchurch.

 

*Specifically quasars - a quasar is an intense stream of electromagnetic energy produced by the immense stresses placed on material that is accreting around, and swirling into, the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. There is a supermassive black hole at the centre of every galaxy.

Edited May 26, 2012 by Krezack

[Morgoth]

Tem ET's still won't make open contact with us, though.

[Malcador]

Not really sold on this causing a radical improvement in the quality of life of RSA, but does look interesting.