Humans have always been drawn to the mysteries of the night sky. On clear nights we can see
thousands of stars and galaxies with our naked eyes alone.
Optical telescopes have allowed us to see millions more, and taught us much of what
we know about the universe by collecting the light that finds its way to earth from space.
More recently, radio telescopes have enabled us to gather radio waves from space, providing
a view of a Universe filled with gas and exotic physical processes in more detail than ever
before.
Modern technology is now driving a rapid expansion of the capability of radio telescopes - and
with it, their potential for new and exciting discoveries.
For decades, scientists and engineers from all over the world have been developing a
radio telescope so large and powerful that it will be able to "see" almost all the
way back to the beginning of the Universe.
This telescope is known as the Square Kilometre Array - or SKA, a project so ambitious that
it will skip a generation in the development of radio telescopes.
The SKA will be constructed in two places - Southern Africa and Australia - and will
be made up of millions of antennas of different types, linked together by fibre optic networks
and feeding data into huge supercomputers.
Australia's SKA site, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in outback Western Australia,
will be home to a Low Frequency array of millions of chest-high "dipole" antennas which
will be spread out in clusters over an area up to a hundred kilometres in diameter.
The Low Frequency array (or, SKA Low) will collect radio waves from the farthest reaches
of space that have stretched out and shifted from high to lower frequency waves as the
Universe has expanded.
Phase one will see over a hundred thousand of these antennas placed in the Australian
outback - extending into the millions over the following decade.
When fully operational, the array will generate staggering quantities of data. Several times
more in fact, than today's entire global internet traffic.
This data will help us to provide answers to some of humanity's oldest and most profound
questions about the universe around us.
All of the data gathered by the SKA in Australia will be correlated and packaged-up on site
before travelling via a dedicated, high capacity fibre-optic connection to the coastal city
of Geraldton and then on to Perth, over 700 kilometres away.
In Perth the data will be processed at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre - an innovative
and purpose-built supercomputer facility.
The sheer volume of data generated by the SKA will require a supercomputer faster and
more powerful than any currently in existence.
Though construction of Phase One of the SKA project is not due to begin until the latter
half of this decade - the Australian core site is already home to two SKA pre-cursor
telescopes.
Testing and developing technology for the SKA, these are both state of the art radio
telescopes in their own right.
The Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope - or ASKAP, built by Australia's CSIRO is a 36-dish
survey array that can capture images from an area of the sky thirty times larger than
previous radio receivers thanks to its revolutionary "phased array feed" receiver technology
- a feature which helps it to survey large areas of the sky quickly and accurately.
The Murchison Widefield Array, or MWA telescope, (a collaboration between several international
universities and organisations) is designed to pick up low frequency radio waves from
deep space. It is already doing ground-breaking science and the lessons being learned in its
design and construction will help to inform the design of the SKA low frequency array.
Both the ASKAP and the MWA are on the brink of making discoveries and breaking records
in radio astronomy.
Both are already playing important roles in the development of the world's largest telescope
- the SKA.
And Australia, as proud co-host of the SKA, looks forward to playing a key role in its
development - helping to unlock the secrets of the Universe.