March 23, 2009
Square Kilometre Array effort receives significant research dollars
NSERC funding will help scientists answer many of the fundamental questions about space
Russ Taylor
One of the biggest challenges of designing the world’s biggest telescope – the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – is detecting and processing the scads of signals from deep space as well as managing and analyzing the data. To help meet that challenge and other scientific problems, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) has given $1.25 million to the group of scientists and engineers working at the U of C on the SKA project under Russ Taylor, chair of the Canadian SKA Consortium as well as the head of the new Institute for Space Imaging Science, which includes the U of C and the University of Lethbridge.
The University of Calgary is the lead Canadian institution on the $3-billion international research project. SKA will be the largest radio telescope ever built and will be used to study naturally occurring radio emissions from the edge of the universe to a distant time before stars and galaxies were formed.
“The SKA is one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken. Advances in digital signal processing, and information and communications technologies will be needed create images of the cosmos from signals received by the tens of thousands of stations in the array.
“The funding will keep the University of Calgary at the forefront of the international effort to solve these problems” says Taylor, the head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the U of C. “It is tough to even get your head around just how much data will travel through the receivers per second, it’s enough to fill the hard drives of 500 personal computers each second.”
Scientists from both the U of C’s Faculty of Science and Schulich School of Engineering are working on the technology behind the SKA and will be funded by the NSERC award. Schulich’s Jim Haslett and Leonid Belostotski are designing the receivers that will gather signals from deep space.
Canadian companies are also interested in the technology challenges for the SKA and are working with Taylor to developing the Canadian SKA research and development program.
Taylor will speak about the science behind the SKA on Tuesday, March 24 during the noon hour in an event hosted by The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the Calgary Place Tower I.
Construction of the SKA is slated to begin in 2012-2013. The telescope will be made up of an array of tens of thousands of radio antenna receiving stations with a total area of one million square meters collecting radio waves from the universe. Starting from the center of the telescope, receiving stations fan out in a spiral pin-wheel pattern extending to a distance of 3,000 km. Australia and South Africa are currently bidding to host the SKA.
For more information, contact:
Grady Semmens
Senior Communications Manager – Research
University of Calgary
Phone: 403-220-7722
Email: gsemmens@ucalgary.ca
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