NZ on founding board for multi-billion dollar radio telescope project
The Square Kilometer Array, the world's biggest radio telescope project, announced its founding board and New Zealand is on it.
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Nine national governmental and research organisations have established a founding board for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project, and the Ministry of Economic Development is on it.
Australia, China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, South Africa, the UK and New Zealand today signed a Letter of Intent in Rome, that declared the countries' desire to see the SKA built and agreement to work together to find funding for the next phase.
The SKA is a 1.5 billion euro project to build the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope, in order to study the radio signature of astronomical objects in order to answer fundamental questions about the universe.
The new board has announced the project will be based at the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester in the United Kingdom, scheduled for January 1 2012, but the array itself will be hosted in either Australia/New Zealand or South Africa, with a decision to be made in 2012.
The tab if New Zealand wins
if an Australia-New Zealand bid is successful, 40 radio telescopes like AUT University's in Warkworth (pictured above) will be built here, at $2 million a pop. NZ's share of the tab would be around $150 million.
The signatory parties represent organisations of national scale. They will coordinate groups carrying out SKA research and development work in their countries, and expect further signatories in the next six months.
The SKA project, the release from the SKA Program Development Office, said the project will drive technology development in antennas, fibre networks, signal processing and software and computing.
"Spin off innovations in these areas will benefit other systems that process large volumes of data. The design, construction and operation of the SKA has the potential to impact skills development in science, engineering and in associated industries not only in the host countries but in all project partners."
NBR Staff
Tue, 12 Apr 2011
Tue, 12 Apr 2011
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NZ on founding board for multi-billion dollar radio telescope project
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