Australia is progressing its commitment in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest radio telescope project.
Considered to be one of the largest scientific endeavours in history, it involves scientists and engineer from 20 countries to construct hundreds of thousands of radio antennas with a combined surface area of around one square kilometer.
If realised, this will provide scientists with the means to explore the universe hundreds of times faster than is possible with current devices.
The antennas will cover three different configurations: a mid-to-high frequency component in South Africa, and a low-frequency component to be constructed in Western Australia's Murchison region.
The Australian Government lobbied hard to be selected as one of the hosts of the project because of the significant opportunities and spill-over benefits the project will bring for our industry and research base.
.This expectation has also been driving Australia's substantial $293 million over 10-years initial investment towards building and operating the SKA.
In March, Australia and six other nations signed an international treaty to establish the SKA observatory, which will be tasked to make the final decisions on the design of the project. The new body will also coordinate the around $1 billion worth of contracts related to building and then operating the telescope and its associated infrastructure.
For industry and researchers it's a lot of money to tap into, but it's also a project that because of its sheer scale is everything but straight forward.
A recent statement from the CSIRO has provided an update on Australia's involvement in the project, which is still in the design phase.
CSIRO is leading the SKA Infrastructure Australia Consortium, which is one of 12 international engineering consortia set up under the project, each addressing specific elements of the SKA.
The body has been designing the infrastructure required for the Murchison telescope including supercomputing facilities, buildings, site monitoring, roads, power and data fibre distribution.
This has also brought up unique challenges associated with the enourmous amount of data that will be generated by the telescope. As CSIRO's SKA Infrastructure Consortium director Antony Schinckel put it, data flows on the scale of petabits, more than the global internet rate today, will all be flowing into a single building in Murchison, requiring 65,000 fibre optic cables.
However, the biggest challenge the researchers face is minimising the radio 'noise' created by the computing and power systems placed at the Murchison Observatory, as they could potentially 'drown out' the faint signals from space the telescope is expected to pick up.
But the pressure to create innovative infrastructure designs to overcome these challenges has the upside that solutions to these problems could also be used in applications beyond astronomy. There are spin-off benefits "that we can’t yet anticipate", Australian SKA Director David Luchetti said.
With the completion of the design phase, there will be a critical review of the entire SKA system, followed by a construction proposal and the begin of on the ground work in early 2020.