World’s largest telescope construction to take 8 years: Square Kilometer Array (SKA)

The decision on which country to host world’s largest radio telescope -powerful enough to detect alien life forms from distant points of the universe-, could be taken on Friday during a new round of discussions between experts who gathered in the Netherlands.

When it is fully completed, in 2024, the telescope Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will include 3,000 antenna featuring 15-meter-diameter and many other smaller antennas to be located within a radius of 3,000 kilometers from the center of the network.

Scanning the sky at 10,000 times higher speed and 50 times better sensitivity than any other telescope, the SKA will study the origins of the universe and will be able to detect even the weakest signals that could indicate the presence of alien life.

Australia and New Zealand compete together against South Africa for the right to host this project worth $2 billion, which has the potential to boost local economy and provide a scientific prestige to the country to be chosen by the Experts Committee.

The lobby made by the two camps was particularly intense. Australia is worried about security issues arising from the location of such a costly project in South Africa, a country facing one of the highest crime rates in the world. In turn, South Africa accused its competitors for using dirty tricks and intentionally leaking information on the project, although the deliberations should be secret.

In March, a committee of experts seemed to offer a slight advantage for South African application, but after an intense lobbying practiced by both sides, the decision was postponed, and another group of experts received the task to examine the scientific and economic implications if the project would be split in two location.

This group are due to present a report on Friday in the Netherlands, but many scientists have already said that dividing the project will almost certainly generate additional costs.

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SKA is a major scientific stake. Global companies specialized in high technology have begun to create financing deposits for this project, which uses a technology that does not even exist yet, in order to process a huge flow of information collected daily. Scientists say that the SKA will need a processing power of a few million times the power of today’s fastest computers.

Giant International Business Machines Corp.. (IBM) and Astron – Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy – announced in April, a 33 million euro credit allocated for the SKA project. The amount aims at being used to build extremely fast and low energy consumption computer systems over a period of five years.

“If we consider world’s daily internet traffic and multiply it by two, we find the range required for data collection and processing of the Square Kilometer Array telescope every day,” said Ton Engbersen, a researcher at IBM.

Other companies that have signed partnership agreements with the scientific project are Nokia-Siemens, BAE Systems PLC, Cisco Systems Inc.. and Selex Galileo, a British subsidiary of the Italian group Finmeccanica SpA.

The first phase into the telescope’s building is scheduled to take place in 2016, but by 2019, about 10% of the project should be completed by placing the antennas on a circular distance of 100 kilometers from the center of the telescope. Extending this area to targeted 3,000 km range would be completed by 2023, and the project will be fully operational as of 2024.

The consortium which plans to build this telescope has its headquarters in the UK and is formed by the following countries: Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa.