South Africa has been developing innovative technology specifically in the defence industry for many years. The technologies included, The Rooivalk attack helicopter, the G5 towed howziter (Cannon) and probably the most well-known of all is the G6 self-propelled gun howzitzer. These technologies is in my mind not a good reflection of South Africa , as these technologies is used in war all over the world. The technology and science advances which we as a nation and Australia can be proud of is what is now called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA)
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a large multi radio telescope project aimed to be built in Australia and South Africa. If built, it would have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre. It would operate over a wide range of frequencies and its size would make it 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument. It would require very high performance central computing engines and long-haul links with a capacity greater than the current global Internet traffic. It should be able to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than ever before.
With receiving stations extending out to distance of at least 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) from a concentrated central core, it would exploit radio astronomy's ability to provide the highest resolution images in all astronomy. The SKA would be built in the southern hemisphere, in sub-Saharan states with cores in South Africa and Australia, where the view of the Milky Way Galaxy is best and radio interference least
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The SKA will be built in phases and we are now in what is called the Meerkat phase. The Meerkat is the world's first radio Telecsope array consisting of composite antennas, as described on the SKA website. The SKA will open so many doors for us in future exploration of our known Universe.
Big data
Now this is where this technology is becoming very interesting. To quote the Chief Architect of the SKA programme,
“In a normal scientific instrument, most of the effort goes into building the instrument itself, and the data gathered can be analysed using common tools, including even spreadsheet programs.
A big data instrument like the SKA has different challenges. Composed of many antennas, the SKA will gather a lot of data, therefore a lot of effort must go not only in building the telescope itself, but also in dealing with the data it will produce, which will have to be processed in parallel on the equivalent of millions of computers.
Because there will be so much data coming in all the time, and we only have a limited amount of space available, it will also be necessary to process and store the useful data and then delete the rest quickly so that more data can be collected.
Finally, scientists will have to write very sophisticated computer programs to be able to search for what they want in the stored data, like a needle in a very big haystack.
As an example, the SKA’s first phase of development will see the equivalent of 3 TB (about the size of a standard desktop computer disk) transmitted every second to the central processing computer. So that’s Big Data”
The SKA will create 10 times the amount of data which is being created on the internet today, now that is Big Data :) Many of the scientists around the world, is eagerly awaiting the start of the world's largest science project to start.
Please take some time to view the introduction video of the telescope here.
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