The SKA will be made up of thousands of antennas spread across remote areas of Australia and South Africa. Linked together, they will form the world’s largest radio telescope, surveying the sky ten thousand times faster than ever before. When this powerful instrument is operational, who knows what scientists will discover about dark matter, dark energy, galaxies, and life elsewhere.

The detailed design of the networking system has been developed by a consortium that brought together 15 different organisations spread across eight countries, including AARNet working with CSIRO in Australia.

Led by the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics group at University of Manchester in the UK, the consortium faced the challenge of designing a system that will be required to transport unprecedented amounts of data over vast distances, while ensuring that signals are synchronised in a way that enables the arrays to operate together like a single telescope, a huge challenge given the large number of antennas spread over hundreds of kilometres.

During four and a half years of collaboration, consortium members were responsible for the design of two data transport networks:

The first, the Digital Data Backhaul, transports signals from the radio telescopes to the Central Signal Processor on site, where the initial processing takes place – known as beamforming and correlation.

The second network transfers data products from the CSP to the Science Data Processor, located hundreds of kilometres away. There the data for actual science will be processed before being distributed to the SKA Regional Centres around the world. The data rates involved are huge, in total equivalent to about a third of the world’s internet traffic.

In addition, SaDT also designed a network that connects all the telescopes locations and transports the telescopes’ monitoring and control information, together with the general communications traffic.

Read the original SKA Org media release

Read more about the SKA

Image: An artist’s impression of the future Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Australia. Up to 132,000 low frequency antennas (resembling metal Christmas trees) will be built at CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in outback Western Australia ©SKA Organisation