Western Australia is a strong contender to become the venue for a $1.7 billion telescope.
Western Australia is a strong contender to become the venue for a $1.7 billion telescope.
Science Minister Dr Judy Edwards told a parliamentary estimates committee last week that WA had been named Australia’s preferred venue for The Square Kilometre Array Project (SKA), and that Australia had a strong chance of winning the science-based project over the coming decade.
The venue for the 17-country international project will be announced next year, with construction of the huge radio-astronomy facility to begin in 2012.
China, South Africa and Argentina are the other contenders.
“WA had to bid and stated that it believed it had the best radio-quiet zone in Australia,” Dr Edwards said.
“We competed against a number of other states – WA was successful.
Dr Edwards said the CSIRO’s national telescope facility decided last year that Mileura Station, west of Cue, was the preferred Australian site.
“At this stage the Australian proposal is under development,” Dr Edwards said.
The SKA will be an array of up to 1,000 smaller individual antennas, some of which could be steerable satellite dishes, spherical radio lenses, or electronically steered flat sheets to look out at different parts of the universe.
Antennas will be arranged in compact groups of up to several hundred, with each group taking up an area of about 100 meters in diameter.
The intention is for the telescope facility to detect signals in the approximate frequency range of 150MHz to 20GHz.
The design being considered by scientists would be distributed across about 2000 square kilometres, while the hardware itself would cover just 1sq km of this.
More than 120 international astronomers converged on Geraldton in 2003 to consider the SKA project.
The SKA facility would be designed to detect and receive extremely faint signals emitted many light years away from earth.
In February traditional Aboriginal owners of the proposed Mileura Station site agreed to the building of the SKA facility on their lands.
The station was owned until last year by the Walsh family, and according to its new managers it is being regularly visited by scientists from around Australia, who are monitoring signals and conducting other scientific assessments and assessing certain materials that would be incorporated into SKA equipment.
The State Government’s Office of Science and Innovations is involved in the project.
Major participating countries include Canada, the US, India, Japan, China, France, the UK, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Russia, New Zealand and The Netherlands.
The SKA project’s planning groups is headquartered in The Netherlands.
The nearly $2 billion price tag for the astronomical facility would be outlaid on a complex array of antennas, microwave receivers, digital processing equipment and software.
The SKA is the next generation of radio telescope and will have a 100-times greater collecting area than the biggest present-day instruments.
Australian institutions involved in the SKA project include the CSIRO, the University of Sydney, the Australian National University and Swinburne University of Technology.
The CSIRO’s planning consortium assessed two sites in WA, one about 200km east of Kalgoorlie, south of the Great Victoria Desert, and the Mileura Station.
Several South Australian sites and one near Broken Hill were also assessed.
If Mileura Station is chosen ahead of rival international sites as the venue, WA can expect benefits over and above basic maintenance and protection work.
A paper presented by the CSIRO’s SKA program leader, Dr Peter Hall, last year suggested the project would require a coordinating SKA project office that would probably retain one or more specialist management and consulting engineering firm.
“The large scale and wide geographic distribution of the SKA means the project will require at least construction and commissioning expertise not present in the astronomy community,” Dr Hall said.
“The SKA project cannot hope to build its own teams.
“The most feasible way of harnessing both industry and astronomy expertise is to forge and R&D collaborations between small specialist groups and motivated external parties.”
Treasurer Eric Ripper has allocated $720,000 this financial year and $3.6 million next financial year for the project.
“It is proposed to develop a demonstrator project estimated to cost $16 million at Mileura in conjunction with the CSIRO,” a budget document said.
