Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 October 2006 13:17
Business IT -
Networking
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The short-list of potential host countries for the Euro 1 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope has been narrowed to Australia and South Africa: winning the project could double Australia's international bandwidth requirements.
The International SKA Steering Committee announced on 28 September that the final choice of country to host the project would be made between Australian and South Africa towards the end of the decade.
For Australia, the core site is proposed to be at Mileura station, about 100km west of Meekatharra in Western Australia. Other dishes would be distributed over the Australian continent with the possibility of extension into New Zealand. In Southern Africa, the central location would be at the Karoo site in the Northern Cape region about 95km from Carnarvon, with further dishes located elsewhere in South Africa and in Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius, Kenya, and Ghana.
A key requirement of the core site is that there must be a very low level of man-made radio signals, because interference will mask the faint cosmic radio waves the telescope is designed to detect. However another key requirement for the project, not spelt out in the announcement of the short lis,t will be massive amounts of global bandwidth to feed data from the telescope to astronomers around the world."
These requirements were spelt out in "Big Pipes: Connecting Western Australia to the Global Knowledge Economy", a report produced by the WA Government in April 2006. http://www.wa.gov.au/tiac/ictforum/reports.html
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