Boffins hit Wellington for mega-telescope bid talks

By Pattrick Smellie

Sept. 22 (BusinessDesk) – One of the most important networking events in New Zealand’s recent scientific history is occurring in Wellington today and tomorrow.

With the filing of a formal joint Australia-New Zealand bid for the $3 billion global telescope project, the Square Kilometre Array, a who’s who of New Zealand scientists, software engineers and high value manufacturing executives are in Wellington getting serious about the prospect of a win.

The alternative bidder for the telescope for probing deep space involves a consortium of African countries. The project must be in the Southern Hemisphere and offer the quietest radio-frequency.

“The new generation radio telescope will be 50 times more powerful than existing instruments and be built in the Southern Hemisphere for the best view of the galaxy with the least radio interference,” said the Science Media Centre’s Peter Griffin.

“A decision on whether it will straddle the Tasman or be sited across a series of African countries is expected to be announced in late February or early March, and an Australasian footprint would give New Zealand its biggest science project.”

Victoria University radio astronomer Dr Melanie Johnston-Hollitt has also been named today as New Zealand's science representative on the international founding SKA board, and . Ministry of Economic Development executive Jonathon Kings also joined the board.

Dr Johnston-Hollitt said that regardless of where the new telescope was built, New Zealand would enjoy "significant benefits" from the project, because of its involvement in the $40 million Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope in Western Australia -- one of three "precursor" SKA instruments -- probing the low frequency end of the radio spectrum.

Friday’s agenda concentrates on aligning research and New Zealand high-tech industry in sectors such as energy-efficient parallel computing to help run the massive computing power associated with the telescope.

"With the Square Kilometre Array, a fire hose doesn't begin to describe how much data comes out of an antenna. Parallelism is the only way we can handle the deluge of data,” she said.

(BusinessDesk)

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