New Zealand Joins Aussie Bid For Vast Radio Telescope Array 60
schliz writes "A radio telescope in New Zealand has joined five in Australia to challenge Southern Africa to host the international Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in 2012. The newly connected telescope in Warkworth, New Zealand (PDF), is connected to an Australian data processing facility via a 1 Gbps network. Each telescope reportedly produces up to 1 Tb of data per hour of observation. IBM expects the whole of the SKA to produce an exabyte of data per day."
Re:translation (Score:3, Insightful)
But I thought LOC was a measure of information not data.
So, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I do not understand what is so interesting about this. Another dish added to various international VLBI networks. There is also one such dish near Urumqi in China in a very remote area. There are so many of these kind of dishes around the world. Even here in the Netherlands we have one. But we also have LOFAR [lofar.org], which is also capable of producing large amounts of data everyday. This kind of systems usually only operate for short periodes and the data produced are immediately processed and only the results are stored.
Re:It's nice to have a real time link for this wor (Score:3, Insightful)
It's hard to get the phone company to install a fiber cable run up a mountain.
How expensive would it be to lay out the fiber yourselves? About $5k per mile to the closes phone company supported location? How far would it be?
Just asking.
Is this really a good idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
Think twice, New Zealand. If the aliens start beaming you back porn, then Australia will have to filter your radio telescopes.
Re:Three Cheers for the SKA (Score:3, Insightful)
In arrays, you want _many baselines_ (telescope to telescope distances) and you want them to be _long_, because that will make your image better. It shouldn't be as large as the earth-radius though, otherwise you can only observe a few hours per day.
The SKA is being built in South Africa or Australia, and New Zealand would like to provide an "addon" to the SKA -- if it is going to be built in Australia --, that will provide a *huge* improve on the baselines involved. Tests have shown that the imaging capability drastically improves, so it would be well worth it.
Disclaimer: I am researching in the NZ institute mentioned.
Re:It's nice to have a real time link for this wor (Score:3, Insightful)
> What's more important?
Astronomy. Fuck the squirrels. They'll survive a little construction work.
> ...redneck construction workers fucking everything up?
Bigot.
> You think maybe those laws exist for a reason?
All laws exist for a reason. It usually isn't a good one. In this case it is because reactionary ecofreaks have better political connections than do astronomers.
Add some windmills to yout installation and come up with a plausible reason why they need fiber. The permits will slide right through.