UK to build software brain for giant radio telescope

A group of UK institutions is going to build a prototype "brain" to control the world's biggest radio telescope.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will initially comprise 197 dishes and 130,000 antennas spread across South Africa and Australia.

All will be linked and need to work in perfect harmony.

The software now being developed for the purpose will be trialled on a small subset of the infrastructure before being rolled out across the network.

The SKA is an immense computing challenge, says Dr Chris Pearson, astronomy group leader at RAL Space, based on the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire.

"We're talking something like 600 petabytes (600 million gigabytes) per year of data coming out of the SKA, to be delivered to astronomers worldwide," he said.

"So it's a scaling problem, it's a processing problem, it's a data transfer problem."

The SKA is one of the grand scientific projects of the 21st Century, and will join a series of next-generation telescopes coming online this decade. This includes the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and the super-sized European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will have an optical primary mirror 39m in diameter.

The international organisation behind the SKA gave the formal "go" last year to begin construction of the array - a task that will take most of this decade.

The UK government, through the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC), is the largest contributor to the SKA organisation and currently has a commitment to support 15% of the total cost of construction and the initial operations from 2021 to 2030.