[AstroNet] New Radio telescope in Aus

[Sam Rametse]

http://www.wiastro.com/MoreHotBlogs.html


New View of the Sun: Radio Telescope Could Save World Billions Through
Advanced Warnings


ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2012) - A small pocket of Western Australia's remote
outback is set to become the eye on the sky and could potentially save the
world billions of dollars. The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio
telescope, unveiled November 30, will give the world a dramatically improved
view of the Sun and provide early warning to prevent damage to communication
satellites, electric power grids and GPS navigation systems.

 

 

The $51 million low-frequency radio telescope will be able to detect and
monitor massive solar storms, such as the one that cut power to six million
people in Canada in 1989 during the last peak in solar activity.

In 2011, experts warned that a major solar storm could result in damage to
integral power supplies and communication networks of up to US$2 trillion --
the equivalent of a global Hurricane Katrina.

The MWA will aim to identify the trajectory of solar storms, quadrupling the
warning period currently provided by near-Earth satellites. This is timely
as the Sun is due to re-enter peak activity in 2013, with a dramatic
increase in the number and severity of solar storms expected, with the
potential to disrupt global communications and ground commercial airlines.

The completion of the MWA realises eight years of work by an international
consortium of 13 institutions across four countries (Australia, USA, India
and New Zealand), led by Curtin University.

The Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO: operated by CSIRO) was
chosen by the consortium because it is the world's best location for low
frequency radio astronomy. The site has also been selected as the future
home for a major part of the Square Kilometre Array.

"The MWA will keep watch on the Sun during the upcoming period of maximum
solar activity. It has the potential to deliver very real and immediate
benefits to the entire global population. It is a tremendous achievement and
testament to the innovative technologies that have been developed to support
this instrument," said Director of the MWA and Professor of Radio Astronomy
at Curtin University, Steven Tingay

The MWA is ground-breaking in other ways too -- it will offer scientists an
unprecedented view of the entire history of the Universe, to gain a better
understanding of how the early Universe formed and the relationship between
gravity and dark matter evolved, including how the very first stars and
galaxies formed.

"Understanding how the dramatic transformation took place soon after the Big
Bang, over 13 billion years ago, is the final frontier for astrophysicists
like me. It has taken eight years to get to this point and it is incredibly
exciting to have completed construction and to be collecting scientific data
from the MWA," Professor Tingay said.

"Preliminary testing, using only a fraction of the MWA's capability, has
already achieved results that are on par with the best results ever achieved
in the search for the first stars and galaxies.

"We anticipate a 10-fold improvement in performance when the full
capabilities of the MWA are pressed into service in early 2013," Professor
Tingay told a group of eminent scientists and VIPs who had travelled from
all over the world to attend the telescope's unveiling.

This sentiment has been supported by 2011 Nobel Laureate and member of the
Murchison Widefield Array Board, Professor Brian Schmidt, who described the
telescope as a highly ambitious project:

"With it we will, for the first time, be able to look at the transformation
of the Universe from a rather boring environment of hydrogen and helium to
the point where the stars, galaxies, and black holes create the vibrant
Universe as we know it," Professor Schmidt said.

"This telescope is an exciting and necessary part of the process of
discovery and I see it as a step towards, if not the tool for, an important
scientific breakthrough."

The Murchison Widefield Array will have four primary areas of scientific
investigation; as well as looking back into the time to the early Universe,
soon after the Big Bang, and its in-depth study of the Sun -- Earth
connection, the data produced by the telescope will also be used to better
understand our galaxy and distant galaxies, as well as violent and explosive
phenomena in the Universe.

The MWA has been supported by both State and Federal Government funding,
with the majority of federal funding administered by Astronomy Australia
Limited. The MWA project recognises the Wadjarri Yamatji people as the
traditional owners of the site on which the MWA is built and thanks the
Wadjarri Yamatji people for their support.

Murchison Widefield Array Facts

Located 370 km north-east of Geraldton (nearly 800 km from Perth) the MWA is
situated in the Shire of Murchison, an area of approximately 50,000 square
kilometres (19,300 square miles) and has a population of 114 people. The MWA
is located at CSIRO's Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO).

The Murchison Widefield Array will pick up radio waves that have travelled
between 8 minutes (the Sun) and more than 13 billion years (soon after the
Big Bang) to reach Earth.

The telescope spans a 3 diameter kilometre area and is entirely static (no
moving parts). It uses 2,048 dual-polarisation dipole antennas arranged into
a strategic formation of 128 groups (16 dual-polarisation dipoles per
group).

Each of these antennas has been constructed from a flat-pack style design
and built in-situ at the MRO by a team of undergraduate students from Curtin
University, known as the Student Army.

The telescope is considered low-cost, with each antenna costing
approximately $3,000. Comparatively a high frequency dish telescope costs in
the region of $500,000.

Radio waves collected from the sky are digitised, producing a new image of
the sky every few seconds. These are then sent via high speed optical fibre,
an early part of the National Broadband Network, to a processing and
archiving facility over 700 kilometres away in Perth (the $80m Pawsey HPC
Centre for SKA Science).

When operating at full capacity the telescope will produce the equivalent of
a 2 hour long HD movie every 10 seconds (approximately 4 GB every 10
seconds).

Technology giants IBM and Cisco, as well as Western Australian based firm
Poseidon Scientific Instruments (acquired by Raytheon in July 2012), have
worked with the consortium to create highly specialised hardware to process
the vast amount of data created by the telescope.

The primary archiving facility will be the $80million Pawsey HPC Centre for
SKA Science, which is being built in Perth. Information is also being
automatically transferred to MWA partner organisations in Boston in the
United States (MIT) and Wellington in New Zealand (Victoria University of
Wellington).

 

 

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