4th NL SKA Industry Information meeting

© NL SKA Office

Today, a long overdue, 4th NL SKA Industry Information meeting is being held in Dwingeloo. Representatives from Dutch companies interested in playing a role in the SKA will hear of project developments over the past two years. After a fairly quiet initial period in which the new SKA Organisation, based at Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester (UK) took up the leadership of the project, 2013 saw the allocation of work packages to (self funded) multinational consortia. ASTRON is leading two of these: the Low and Mid Frequency Aperture Array consortia. The institute is also heavily involved in the central processor- and science data processing consortia - supported largely by the DOME collaboration with IBM (see yesterday's Daily Image). There are many areas of overlap between SKA technology development and the various roadmaps that have been developed in recent years as part of the Dutch government's Top-Sector policy initiative.

The Square Kilometer Array is to be built in two phases in both Australia and South Africa. In Phase 1, hundreds of phased array antenna stations (with up to a quarter of a million antennas) similar to those used in LOFAR will be built in Australia. In parallel, 190 dishes in South Africa and 60 dishes equipped with phased array feeds will be built in Australia, incorporating the two precursors ASKAP and MeerKAT that are under construction now. In addition to these very visible parts of the SKA, significant investments in network and power infrastructure will be needed. Processing of the massive data streams will require state of the art digitial processing algorithms and hardware. The scale of these developments are such that they require an industrial approach. Opportunities for industry involvement, both in the design phase (2014-2016) as well as in the construction phase (2017-2023) will be discussed.

Apart from ASTRON speakers involved in various aspects of the SKA Project, the participants will also hear from commercial companies involved in previous and ongoing radio astronomy projects at ASTRON.

For further information, including a programme: http://www.astron.nl/general/nl-ska-industry-meeting/nl-ska-industry-meeting