Abstract :
The Square Kilometer Array is an international initiative to build the most powerful radio astronomy telescope. The first pulsar is discovered in AD 1967 using radio telescope. The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) uses the same core principles, but is to be built on a much larger scale. So the SKA needs to be sited in a remote area, preferably a desert, far from human populations and equipment such as television transmitters, microwave ovens, radar and mobile phones. SKA will be largely controlled from Europe and its observations fed back to the continent, the telescope will be built a long way away. In AD 2006, the field was narrowed down by a panel of experienced astronomers to Australia and South Africa. The international SKA office, is run by the University of Manchester, which operates the Jodrell Bank radio observatory in the UK and is responsible for picking the final location. The SKA Design Studies (SKADS) project focuses on the development of the Aperture Plane Phased Array which uses fast digital technology to make a flexible, multitasking telescope that will be able to perform many different astronomical observations at the same time. The square kilometre refers to the total collecting area of all the dishes and aperture arrays. In practice, the total physical extent of the array is likely to be around 3,OOOkm. This provides better resolution on smaller objects. The main purposes of SKA will be as a discovery and surveying instrument to find a billion galaxies. SKA try´s to detect hydrogen, which is the most common element in the universe, and which emits at 1.42GHz. Iniverse is expanding, the further away the object, the faster it recedes and the Doppler Effect serves to reduce the frequency of hydrogen. The upshot is that you can place these galaxies in 3D space. The SKA frequency spectrum covers from 70MHz to 10GHz. For the phased arrays we are concentrating on frequencies below the magic 1.4GHz hydrogen emission. Europe plans to build a phase array whe- e
Keywords :
Doppler effect; astronomical image processing; cosmology; galaxies; hydrogen; mainframes; parallel machines; pulsars; radiotelescopes; AD 1967; AD 2006; ASIC code; Aperture Plane Phased Array; Doppler Effect; FPGA; Gaussian noise; H; HartRAO; Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory; Jodrell Bank radio observatory; Johannesburg; KAT; Karoo Array Telescope; Maxwell equation; MeerKAT; Northern Cape Province; SKA; SKA Design Studies; SKADS project; South Africa; Square Kilometer Array; UK; Universe; University of Manchester; digital signal processing; digital technology; dish diameter; frequency 1.42 GHz; frequency 70 MHz to 10 GHz; galaxies; graphics handling; hydrogen detection; multicore processor; pulsar; radio astronomy telescope; sky survey; supercomputer software;
