IAC 2025 Work on the datacenter that serves the Square Kilometre Array’s (SKA’s) site in Western Australia is all but complete, including the installation of two Faraday cages to ensure the equipment inside does not leak radio waves that could harm the operation of the giant radio telescope.
The SKA is an international project that is constructing 131,072 individual antennae with a combined area of around 1km2, making it comfortably the world’s biggest radio telescope and hopefully one that gives humanity a tool with which to gain new perspectives on our universe.
Work on the project started in 2022, and according to Professor Philip Diamond, director of the SKA Observatory, the project team has already installed 12,100 antennae and completed most of the work to install power cables and optic fibers.
Speaking to The Register from the International Astronautical Conference (IAC) in Sydney, Diamond said work on a datacenter located in Murchison, the remote location of the Australian part of the SKA, is also almost complete.
Diamond said the datacenter houses around 100 racks, mostly vanilla servers that use FPGAs programmed to filter the many terabytes of data the SKA will collect every day so that only valuable info is sent over the 10TB/s capable optic fibre link that connects the facility to supercomputers in the city of Perth.
The SKA’s designers chose Murchison because it is remote and almost devoid of human activity – and therefore also a radio-quiet location.
Computers, however, produce lots of stray RF. That’s not a problem in most datacenters and office settings. But it’s a major issue for the SKA, which will try to detect extremely faint signals.
The remote datacenter is therefore encased in two Faraday cages – metal screens that block electromagnetic energy. Even entrances to the building are shielded to minimize escaping signals.
“People effectively go through airlocks,” Diamond said. “The inner door will not open until the outer door is closed. And they make Star-Trek-like noises as they open and close.”
Diamond said construction work on the SKA will likely continue until 2029, but that the project will call on scientists to submit proposals for using the ‘scope next year, and will chose some of them to run tests of the facility in 2027.
“By then we will have the largest physical low-frequency telescope on the planet, and we will ask for ideas for objects to observe,” he told The Register
The SKA team will use chosen projects to verify the facility’s operations, but Diamond said he expects scientists won’t request only simple observations.
“The science community’s aspirations and ideas may run ahead of our ability to satisfy them,” he said, noting that he expects and welcomes constant creative tension as astroboffins try to use the SKA to make new discoveries.
But Diamond thinks the SKA’s tests in 2027 will still produce results worthy of inclusion in scientific papers.
One barrier to that achievement is finding more money. Diamond said the SKA has 80 percent of the funds it needs to complete the project, but is confident it will secure the remainder. ®
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