Square Kilometre Array - the bids are in, now we wait...

If the joint Australian and New Zealand bid to host the ambitious Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project comes off, at some $2.5 billion it will be the biggest science project in Australian history, and one of the biggest infrastructure projects here period.

Source: http://ska.gov.au

Most of the 3000 radio telescope dishes and antennas of three different types, would cover a massive area in the Murchison desert north-east of Geraldton in Western Australia. The dishes, each about 15 metres in diameter, would radiate out from the main site to broaden the virtual antenna size, including several dishes across Australia and into New Zealand.

The setup will be 50 times more sensitive than anything currently available, and with a discovery potential some 10,000 times greater than we now have.

CSIRO Array director Dr Brian Boyle addressed our CSIRO Tweetup in November. He was confident that the science is with the ANZ bid. But there is more to it than that...

The Australian and New Zealand team have made their final pitch to the site selection committee, and so has the South African team. The ANZ bid site has a grand population of just eight, Dr. Boyle told us, and the WA Government has legislated a development exclusion zone around the site to protect it from radio noise incursion.

Plus - a big plus - we have the National Broadband Network under construction right now. When no-one even now is sure how they are going to cope with the massive amounts of data that will pour out of the antenna, the NBN may be our biggest trump card. Storing the data may still be a big unknown, but at least we'll be able to move it from place to place.

The SA proposal, as this The Age article explains, would sprawl across eight strife-prone countries. There is a concern though that many of the countries funding the project may favour the SA bid because their funding can be claimed as 'foreign aid'.

And that's where the problem lies. Will politics get in the way of the decision, or will the best interests of the science project itself dominate the decision? Nobody knows. We'll all just have to wait until February to know...

It's interesting though that the official SKAtelescope.org media fact sheet has all its pictures showing the Australian site...

Twitter users can follow Doctor Boyle via @brianboyleska
You can learn more about the ANZ SKA project at ska.gov.au.
And you can watch this neat 2:40 video production: