Ska

[xtermin8or]

South Africa has been shortlisted to host the Square Kilometre Array telescope along with Australia beating out China and Argentina

Costing about €1 billion, the SKA will be the largest telescope ever. With a receiving area of a million square metres it will be much larger and more sensitive than today's best radio telescope. The SKA will consist of many small antennas, with a dense inner core that becomes further apart as you move away from the center.

Looking back to the dawn of the Universe

The telescope will be powerful enough to probe the secrets of the very early Universe, to help us understand the structure of our Milky Way, the origin of other stars and galaxies, how planets are formed and distributed, and to solve the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter. The signals received by all its antennas will be combined using advanced electronic and computing systems to form a deep image of the cosmic radio sky.

The Minister for Science and Technology, Mosibudi Mangena, said today that South Africa's shortlisting as one of two possible sites for the Square Kilometre Array telescope is a great step for science in South Africa. The final decision on where to site the SKA will be taken by the major international science funding agencies by 2008. South Africa's site bid has been led by a Steering Committee chaired by Dr Rob Adam, previous Director General of the DST, Dr Khotso Mokhele, previous President of the National Research Foundation and the current Director General of the DST, Dr Phil Mjwara.
full article

 

[Leitmotif]

And here I thought this was about music.

 

[Scooby_Doo]

Who wants to be that lack of bandwidth will bust this deal, lol. Most other telescopes in SA have to write dvds with data and then post it lol, was a news artical somewere on that here.

 

[ajak]

JIP OLD NEWS

 

[xtermin8or]

SA Telescope worth it's SALT

O'Donoghue, addressing the media, said the first scientific data from Salt demonstrated capabilities that other large telescopes did not have.

"And that's the ability to take high-speed images with ultra sensitive CCD detectors... Not many telescopes in the world, big or small, have this kind of capability and none of the large telescopes do, except for Salt."

we have the capability to do it

 

[xtermin8or]

JIP OLD NEWS

announcement on the shortlist was only made today - ignoramus

 

[squirrel]

And here I thought this was about music.

Me too

 

[Kalvaer]

Just got told about it by my Wife, that the release was being given out today and thought we would quickly check if the announcement had been made. I decided to actually check here first while she was checking www.skatelescope.org.

She beat me, and seems Xtermin8tor beat me as well over here

Who wants to be that lack of bandwidth will bust this deal, lol. Most other telescopes in SA have to write dvds with data and then post it lol, was a news artical somewere on that here.

I dont think Bandwidth will not be the main problem though. At least not from what I remember, the biggest problem is our unregulated radio waves. The SKA is designed to pick up radio frequencies galaxies away, and needs very clean "air space" in order to achieve this.

While there is radio free reserve being planned for the SKA, With ICASA's inability to regulate anything.. I doubt they will get it right....

Though I pray I am wrong

The press release can be found here btw: http://www.skatelescope.org/PDF/news/press-release-SKA_site_final_1.pdf