To go where no telescope has gone before

Swinburne Astronomy Productions/ SKA Program Development Office

TILES: These dense aperture array tiles will detect mid-frequency radio signals.

It's coming down to the decider in the "World Cup of Science".

Australia's brightest boffins have finalised their bid to build one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects of the modern age.

In partnership with New Zealand, Australia wants to host the A$2 billion Square Kilometre Array, the most powerful radio telescope built.

The international consortium behind the project - 67 organisations in 20 countries - hopes the SKA will help humanity answer two of its most puzzling questions - how the universe was formed after the Big Bang and do we share it with other beings?

The Sun-Herald can reveal a 1000-page bid document backed by the Australian and New Zealand governments was submitted this month to the SKA international projects office in Manchester. Another bid was lodged this month by South Africa.

The square kilometre in SKA refers to the combined data-collecting area of the 3000 radio antennas - each with a 15-metre diameter dish - located at sites that would stretch 5500 kilometres across the Australian outback and New Zealand.

About half the antennas would be situated in a five-square-kilometre area in the West Australian desert about 600 kilometres north-east of Perth. Another 750 would be located in clumps within 150 kilometres of the main array. The rest would be grouped into 25 stations strung across Australia and into NZ at locations to be revealed.

All antennas would be linked by fibre-optics to a supercomputer in Perth that would have to process a million trillion operations a second - a speed known as an exaflop. That computer speed does not yet exist.

The CSIRO astronomer Brian Boyle, who is leading the charge to have the array centred in Australia, said a group of 12 independent experts would pore over the bid documents, examining issues such as the potential for radio-frequency interference, site security and renewable power sources as well as political, social, financial and legal matters.

"The bid document could fell an ox," Dr Boyle said. "We go for an interview in Washington, DC, in December and then this group of 12 will make a recommendation on the preferred site to the SKA board in early January." A decision on the site will be announced in February.

The Science Minister, Kim Carr, said the bid was a collaborative effort between 47 agencies across Australia and New Zealand that would put both countries at the forefront of international science and generate industry innovation and science spin-offs.

Dr Boyle said the CSIRO was already building a a small-scale version of the SKA, with 36 antennas, in the West Australian desert. It's called the Australia SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) observatory.

Nine of the antennas are already in the ground. By March, all 36 antennas will be in place.

"This shows we're ready, we're prepared ... ASKAP will be the world's fastest survey radio telescope when it becomes fully operational in 2013," Dr Boyle said.

The future SKA would be used to try to form a full physical history of the universe.

"It will test fundamental physical theories. The theories of Einstein, the nature of gravity," he said.

"Radio astronomy has been used in the past in the search for extra-terrestrials. The SKA will increase that search volume a million-fold," Dr Boyle said.

Production of the SKA would begin in 2016 and the first data would be collected in 2020.

- © Fairfax NZ News