MaltaMedia.com

Malta will bring together the leading astronomers and engineers of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world’s largest radio astronomical instrument, in a conference on the 8th and 9th January at the Old University building in Valletta.

This meeting will be instrumental in determining the subsequent design directions of such a telescope and to ensure that Europe and Malta are at the helm of the next stages of the development.

The telescope will provide the most rigorous tests of General Relativity, measure the properties of every single galaxy in the entire universe, as well as investigate the possibility of life beyond our solar system.

The current estimates for the project are €1.5 Billion; while maintenance is expected to run into the €100 million a year.

The key players in the projects are the E.U., the U.S.A., Australia and South Africa.

The SKA will have a radio-wave collecting area equivalent to a million square metres making it 30 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster than any other radio telescope in the world. The telescope will be built using millions of antennae combined to form a “radio wide angle lens” that can constantly monitor the sky.

Due to the inherent sensitive nature of the instrument, the telescope will have to be located in a remote location as far away as possible from human generated interference such as TV and radio stations. Two regions are currently tied for hosting the telescope; the Western Australian desert or the South African Karoo desert

The key feature of the SKA – its enormous collecting area – can only be realised by moving away from traditional telescope designs and by constructing efficient, broadband, low-cost antennas capable of simultaneous multiple fields of view. This goes hand-in-hand with the development of low-cost, low-noise radio-frequency amplifiers and highly-integrated receivers.

Such complexity can not be implemented in a single development stage and many of the participants are building pathfinder instruments to ensure that the full system specifications are met.

Malta is currently vying for a position through Dr Kristian Zarb Adami, who holds a role as a lecturer at the University of Malta and a post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford.

The aim of the design team in Oxford, which is being co-ordinated by Zarb Adami, is to bring the concept of an early-digital, software defined system such as those developed for mobile phones to the radio astronomy world.

Furthermore, through this design concept it will become possible to marry the mass-manufacturing experience of the semiconductor world with the stringent specifications demanded to deliver the science required from the instrument.

This will allow the telescope to be built with reliability and durability at an affordable cost.