The Square Kilometre Array: radio silence in Western Australia for most powerful telescope in history

On a former cattle farm in the remote outback, scientists are laying the ground for the biggest science project of the next 20 years: a radio telescope capable of picking out something like an airport radar on a planet in another solar system. Turn on your phone at your peril, because preserving radio quiet here is priority number one

This is the kind of massive, generational, global scientific project – involving universities, science agencies, private companies, a host of governments – that takes decades to come about, and can come to define departments, careers, national identities, science itself. In Australia alone, the project involves so many different groups and so many different acronyms that it can take a while to get your head around it all, but this, all the scientists say, is the nature of large, international endeavours. “It is complex,†says Dr Jill Rathborne, a CSIRO astronomer. But it’s also “awesomeâ€.

Companies such as Cisco and IBM are keenly interested in SKA and that’s because of the data, and what will be needed to crunch it. Once SKA is fully up and running, it will produce more information each day than the whole of the internet had produced until very recently.

Given that no computer exists that will be able to deal with the volume of what SKA will produce, the success of the project rests on the continuing robustness of Moore’s law: that every 18 to 24 months computer processing power will double.

Moore’s law is quoted very often by the project team. The universe needs to keep bending a knee to it if the data from SKA is going to be of any use to us.

It may sound like a massive leap of faith to a non-scientist, preparing to gather data with no way yet to analyse it, but as Morgan says: “If we built it for a computer we have today, we’ll be selling ourselves short ... massively short. You have to look at the trends, very stable trends on how computers are progressing.â€

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There will be far too much data for it all to be simply recorded. The plan is to “use an algorithm to reduce that data down to a smaller magnitude that you can then process further on a super computerâ€, Morgan says. The detail obviously hasn’t been worked out yet, but “at some point we’ll switch this thing on and it’ll take us a long time to see how it worksâ€.