South Africa’s winning bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) was announced to much fanfare, providing a platform to showcase local talent and ability that arguably hasn’t been seen since Dr Chris Barnard performed the first heart transplant in the 1960s. And it has got local companies lining up to be part of one of the world’s biggest technology projects.
The most powerful telescope ever built, the SKA is a radio telescope – instead of seeing light waves, it will make pictures from radio waves. Thousands of antennas, spread over 3 000 km, will work together as one gigantic, virtual instrument, creating a radio telescope at least 50 times more powerful, and 10 000 times faster than any other radio telescope currently in existence.
As one of the country’s leading technology companies, Altech ISIS, as part of the Altron Group, has registered as an accredited supplier on this project and will be looking to get involved in a number of areas where the SKA project will be requiring their field of technology expertise.
“At the moment, the SKA project is still in the planning phase,” says Anton van Heerden, GM of Altech ISIS. “However, from 2016, there will be a number of opportunities for us to get involved in this amazing project where we will be able to provide in-depth technological input.”
The technologies and systems required for the SKA will require engineers to work at the cutting edge of design and innovation, and there will be technology spin-offs for more generic and commercial applications. For example, the SKA will collect and process significant amounts of data, which will require advances in high-performance computing; while producing thousands of antennas within short time scales will lead to new manufacturing and construction techniques.
“Even though this will largely be a South African project, at least 13 countries and close to 100 organisations are already involved, and more are joining,” says Van Heerden. “We will be privileged to be a part of this initiative, which will change our understanding of how stars and galaxies formed, how they evolved over time, and what the so-called ‘dark-matter’ is that occupies 95% of the Universe.”
A few interesting facts and figures around the SKA project:
• The data collected by the SKA in a 24-hour period, would take nearly two million years to play back on an iPod.
• The SKA will generate enough raw data every day to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods.
• The SKA central computer will have the processing power of about 100 million PCs.
• The SKA will use enough optical fibre to wrap twice around the Earth.
• The dishes of the SKA will produce 10 times the current global Internet traffic.
• The aperture arrays will produce more than 100 times the current global Internet traffic.
• The SKA super-computer will perform 1018 operations per second – equivalent to the number of stars in three million Milky Way-size galaxies. This is needed to process all the data that the SKA will produce.
• The SKA will be so sensitive that it will be able to detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away.
• The SKA will contain thousands of antennas with a combined collecting area of about one square kilometre (that’s one million square metres).