The world's largest radio-telescope prepares to explore the remotest spaces in space

The largest radio telescope in the world is one step closer, with Australian scientists bringing the finishing touches to the construction of the Kilometer Array Square in the far-flunger Western Australian desert.

the Kilometer square chart (SKA) is an ambitious international project that will see the world's largest radio telescope built on two continents, capable of imagining vast areas of the sky at a resolution exceeding that of the Hubble telescope. The SKA will include more than 100,000 low-frequency antennas in Australia and hundreds of parables in South Africa, working together to create a total collection area of ​​1 square kilometer.

The SKA will eventually help scientists to understand how galaxies formed after the Big Bang, to discover the secrets of magnetic fields and black energy and even to potentially look for signs of extraterrestrial life.

But building such a powerful radio telescope requires serious design and construction challenges. Scientists from CSIRO, the Australian National Science Agency at the helm of the Australian project, revealed what was needed to make the world's largest radio telescope work.

"We are laying the groundwork for 132,000 low-frequency SKA antennas in Australia, which will be receiving staggering amounts of data," said Antony Schinckel, director of the CSIRO SKA infrastructure consortium.

"The data streams will be petabits, a million billion bits per second, more than the current global Internet speed, all in one building."

All of this data requires their own infrastructure, including 65,000 fiber optic cables to transfer the data from the antennas to the SKA's supercomputing facilities.

The problems do not stop there. Because the SKA will search for the weakest signals from the deepest and darkest spaces, the team must reduce the interference from ground radio transmissions, including computer systems and power systems that operate the telescope. (The Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory The SKA will be built in a government designated silent radio area, which means no mobile phone, refrigerator, camera or computer is allowed.)

"We are trying to reduce the level of radio emissions by billions of dollars," said Shandip Abeywickrema, senior project engineer at Aurecon, an industry partner working with CSIRO.

"For example, the building of super-computer custom is actually a housing fully welded into a housing, the computer equipment to be located in the internal shield, while the technical support equipment will be located in the shield external."

With infrastructure design finalized in Australia and South Africa, CSIRO says construction of the SKA is expected to begin in 2020.