Environment Writer
ALL science pushed the boundaries of knowledge, but the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) would push these boundaries on the largest scale imaginable, Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor said yesterday.
The SKA was not simply an astronomy project, but a global infrastructure project involving 20 countries with costs that would run into billions of euros. Much of this would be spent on relaying, storing and analysing data captured by the SKA antennae. “This is a task that will require processing power estimated to be equal to several millions of today’s fastest computers,” Pandor said.
She was speaking at the SA Astronomical Observatory yesterday at the launch of the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA).
The international SKA project will build a radio telescope tens of times more sensitive and hundreds of times faster at mapping the sky than today’s best radio astronomy facilities. It will be the world’s largest radio telescope.
SKA scientists say once completed, it will generate data at a rate more than 10 times today’s global internet traffic. It will be powerful enough to detect very faint radio signals emitted by cosmic sources more than 13 billion light years away, when the first galaxies and stars started forming.
Pandor quoted SKA board member, professor John Womersley, who said: “SKA is to some extent an IT project with an astronomy question as a driver.”
Pandor said SKA pushed the boundaries of global technology. “Big tech companies like IBM and Cisco are already involved because they know it will allow them to develop the knowledge and technology that will keep them at the leading edge of computing. This, in turn, will benefit computer users in many spheres, from finance to government to industry, medicine and other sciences,” Pandor said.
The newly formed IDIA would provide training in data science, driven by SKA, for up to 100 young data scientists over the next five years.
Negotiations were underway with companies to prepare massive open online courses in various topics that could be included in the programmes of academic institutions.
“A significant investment in big data is crucial if South Africa is to play a significant role in the world economy in the coming decades,” Pandor said. The SKA will be used to answer fundamental questions such as how the universe formed and evolved, establishing the nature of “dark matter” and “dark energy” and whether there is life elsewhere in the universe.
SKA scientists have said perhaps the most significant discoveries to be made by the SKA “are those we cannot predict”.