The Square Kilometre Array will link millions of square metres of antennas across 3000 kilometres into a single radio telescope sensitive enough to detect a mobile phone on Pluto. This global mega-science project, involving 20 countries, addresses a fundamental gap: current telescopes cannot see the faint radio signals from the universe’s earliest moments, just after the Big Bang. The SKA will chart cosmic history from its beginning to the present day, operating across frequencies from 50 MHz to 20 GHz. The University of Manchester leads the design of the telescope’s optical fibre backbone—a vast sensor network that transports signals from dishes and arrays to a correlator and supercomputer. They also lead development of dedicated hardware for pulsar timing, which will test Einstein’s general relativity and potentially detect gravitational waves. A separate team is designing a new Octagonal Ring Antenna for ultra-sensitive, wide-sky measurements at low frequencies. This is fundamental science. It will not directly change daily life, but similar curiosity-driven astronomy has previously given us WiFi, medical imaging, and GPS. Deeper understanding of the universe’s origins could yield equally unexpected applications.
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The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a large, next-generation radio telescope that is planned to be many times more sensitive than the current most sensitive telescopes in the world and transform our view of the Universe. It is a global mega-science project involving scientists and engineers from institutes and industry partners in more than 20 countries. It will be a radio interferometer with an aggregate collecting area of about 1 million square metres spread over at least 3000 km and operating in the frequency range ~50 MHz to 20 GHz. It is one of a small number of flagship astronomical instruments that will span the entire electromagnetic spectrum from radio to gamma rays, and beyond the electromagnetic spectrum to gravitational waves, cosmic rays and neutrinos, and whose collective aim is chart the full history of the universe from its beginnings in the Big Bang to the present day. In March 2013 the international SKA Office issued a request for proposals (RfP) for consortia to bid for work-packages to undertake the detailed design of the various elements of the SKA telescope and successful consortia were awarded the work by the SKA Board in October. The University of Manchester is the lead institute for the SADT and SAT consortium and is also playing leading roles in three other consortia - NIP in the Central Signal Processing and Science Data Processing consortia, and MFAA antenna design in the Aperture Array consortium. The work to be carried out under this grant focusses on delivering the agreed designs to Critical Design Review level and to produce the procurement documentation to allow the SKA to move forward to a build phase. The various areas being explored as part of this grant are described below. 1) SADT and SAT. The SKA can be regarded as a vast sensor network whose backbone is an optical fibre network linking all elements of the system, from the collectors (dishes, aperture arrays) to the correlator, to the high performance computer science data processor, and on to the national and regional science centres around the world. The University of Manchester leads the consortium working on the optical fibre network and the options for transporting the signals throughout the SKA, as well as on generation and distribution of the synchronisation and timing signals that are used throughout the telescope. 2) NIP. One of the key science projects for the SKA centres on searching for, and then making exquisitely precise timing measurements of, pulsars. This will allow new tests to be performed on Einstein's theory of General Relativity and give the possibility to detect gravity waves. To perform these experiments requires construction of dedicated Non-Imaging Processing (NIP) hardware. This NIP development is being led by the Manchester team. 3) MFAA. Finally, a team from the Electrical and Electronic Engineering department in the University is developing a new receptor technology known as an Octagonal Ring Antenna (ORA) as part of an aperture array. This offers the possibility of extremely sensitive simultaneous measurements over large fractions of the sky at the lower end of the SKA's frequency band.
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