The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will link over a million square metres of radio antennas spread across 3000 km into a single telescope sensitive enough to detect a mobile phone signal on a planet light-years away. This global mega-science project, involving scientists from more than 20 countries, addresses a fundamental gap in our understanding: the full history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present day. The University of Manchester is leading consortia designing the telescope's optical fibre backbone, synchronisation systems, and specialised hardware for pulsar timing—experiments that will test Einstein's theory of General Relativity and potentially detect gravitational waves. This is primarily curiosity-driven fundamental science. The immediate payoff is deeper knowledge: mapping the entire sky every few days, searching for pulsars, and charting cosmic evolution across the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond, into gravitational waves, cosmic rays, and neutrinos. The data processing challenge alone—converting raw telescope data into sky maps in real time—will push computing and algorithm design to new limits. Past fundamental radio astronomy research unexpectedly gave us WiFi; the SKA's engineering innovations in signal transport, antenna design, and high-performance computing could similarly spin off into communications, timing systems, or data infrastructure that quietly underpin modern life.
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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. 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. 4) SDP. The data processing for the SKA will have to manage the vast amounts of data being generated by the telescopes. One of the key challenges will be to convert the raw telescope data into maps of the sky. One of the experiments will map the whole sky every few days, and in order to process this, data new algorithms running in real time will need to be written.
Anna Scaife (Co-Investigator)Anthony Brown (Co-Investigator)Benjamin Stappers (Co-Investigator)Keith Grainge (Principal Investigator)Michael Keith (Co-Investigator)Teresa Anderson (Co-Investigator)
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