Off topic, but …
Still two and a half months to launch of the James Webb. “NASA now is targeting Oct. 31, 2021”. I can’t wait.
Not much James Webb Telescope news other than:
- You can buy a Lego model.
- It’s under threat from LGBT activists.
Not much news on the SKA either, other than:
- ASKAP sees dancing ghosts.
- Construction has started!
https://www.space.com/square-kilometer-array-telescope-construction-starts
Construction of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) observatory, which is set to become the largest radio telescope ever built, will finally commence after nearly 30 years of preparations.
Work on the two sites in Australia and South Africa, where the two separate parts of the radio telescope network will be built, is set to begin July 1, 2021, representatives of the SKA Organisation (SKAO) announced at the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS) on June 29.
The telescope, which will listen to radio signals in the vast range of frequencies between 70 MHz to at least 25 GHz, will have a total collecting area of one square kilometer. Instead of relying on a single extremely large dish, it will consist of a precisely designed network of dishes and antennas distributed across its two sites. The SKA-Mid array, to be located in the Karoo desert in South Africa, will use 197 dishes, each 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter, to listen to the middle frequency bands. The SKA-Low array, listening to the lower frequency bands, will consist of 131,072 antennas located in Western Australia north of Perth.
https://physicsworld.com/a/construction-go-ahead-for-e2bn-square-kilometre-array/
The go-ahead has been given to build what will be the world’s largest radio telescope network. The council of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) gave the green light to construct the €2bn Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Australia and southern Africa. To be complete by 2028.
As its name suggests, the SKA is a facility that intends to have a total collecting area of 1 km2, achieved by spreading out thousands of individual dishes in southern Africa as well as a million wire antennas in Australia. SKA is designed to provide astronomers with unprecedented views of the first stars in the universe and observations of gravitational waves via the radio emissions from pulsars, among other things.
That initial design, however, proved too ambitious and in 2013 officials concentrated on building a much smaller preliminary facility known as SKA1, which was to be complete by 2018. It would feature 250 mid-frequency radio dishes and 250,000 low-frequency dipole antenna to keep costs below a cap of €674m. Despite further woes with members dropping out, such as Germany, and increases in the baseline cost of the project to €900m, that timeline was delayed. Yet a big boost for the project came in March 2019 when Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the UK signed the SKA convention treaty in Rome. That came into effect earlier this year after five countries – including Australia, South Africa and the UK – ratified the convention, creating the SKAO in the process.
More than 500 engineers from 100 institutions worldwide have been involved with the design of the SKA telescopes with over 1000 scientists from 40 countries working on the science case of the project. The final SKA design to be built — similar to that proposed for SKA 1 — includes 197 radio dishes in South Africa, including 64 dishes belonging to the existing MeerKAT array, as well as 131 072 individual antennas in Australia. The cost of constructing the two telescope arrays and operations for the coming decade will be about €2bn – €1.3bn to build the instrument and €700m for operations. The UK, which hosts the headquarters of the observatory at the Jodrell Bank site in Cheshire, will contribute £270m.
SKA will be built in stages with eight dishes and an 18-station array of antennas – each station featuring 512 antennas — ready by 2025. By the start of the following year SKA will include a 64-dish array and 64 antenna stations while in 2027 it will have a 133-dish array and 256 antenna stations.