Building the world’s biggest telescope

About the speaker

Dr. Lisa Harvey-Smith is an astronomer at CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science. Her research into the birth and death of stars in our Galaxy and the nature of cosmic magnetic fields is published in leading international journals.

Harvey-Smith is the project scientist for the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP). As well as being the world's fastest survey telescope at cm-wavelengths, ASKAP is a technology demonstrator and precursor for the $2billion international Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be an order of magnitude more powerful than any existing radio telescope.Harvey-Smith contributes to science-engineering trade-off studies for the SKA and serves on the international SKA science working group. She is also a member of the scientific advisory committee to the Australian government on the SKA.

Dr. Harvey-Smith is a passionate public advocate for astronomy. She has writtenfor The Conversation and ABC Onlineas well as featuring inWomen’s Health, The Age, The Weekend Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun Herald, The Sunday Telegraph, Al Jazeera English and ABC News 24.In 2012 she was named inthe (Sydney) magazine’slist of Sydney’s 100 most influential people.

Lisa regularly speaks at universities, research institutes, schools, colleges, museums, science festivals and astronomical societies. She is a mentor at the Pia Wadjarri remote community school in Western Australia and teaches science at Leichhardt Public School as part of CSIRO’s ‘Scientists in Schools’ program.

About the talk

The CSIRO is a leading member of an international science and industry collaboration charged with designing a revolutionary radio telescope. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a giant distributed radio telescopecomprising over 1 million separate radio detectorswith unprecedented sensitivity and panoramic imaging capability. By the end of this decade, the SKA will grace areas of outback Western Australian and the Karoo region of South Africa.The vast information-gathering surface area of the telescope, coupled with its wide-field vision, will transform our ability to study the universe.

Although smaller radio telescope networks have been built before, the sheer scale of the SKA telescope brings with it some enormous technological challenges. In real-time, the SKA will stream 100 times more data than the current global internet traffic through 80,000 km of dedicated underground fibre optic cables into a giant supercomputer with a processing power equivalent to the human brain. That's a processing power in excess of 1 Exaflops, or 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 floating-point operations per second. Rising to these challenges will require significant developments in data transport and processing. This is a rich area of academic-industry collaboration in which spin-off technologies will almost certainly follow.

In this talk, CSIRO astronomer Dr. Lisa Harvey-Smith describes the cosmic mysteries the SKA will help to solve and the technological challenges facing this amazing global project.

Shine Dome,9 Gordon Street Australian Capital Territory

Contact Information

Event Manager: Mitchell Piercey
Phone: (02) 6201 9462

4:30 PM December 02, 2014
FOR Public
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Add to Calendar 02/12/2014 4:30 PM 02/12/2014 4:30 PM Australia/Sydney Building the world’s biggest telescope

About the speaker

Dr. Lisa Harvey-Smith is an astronomer at CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science. Her research into the birth and death of stars in our Galaxy and the nature of cosmic magnetic fields is published in leading international journals.

Harvey-Smith is the project scientist for the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP). As well as being the world's fastest survey telescope at cm-wavelengths, ASKAP is a technology demonstrator and precursor for the $2billion international Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be an order of magnitude more powerful than any existing radio telescope.Harvey-Smith contributes to science-engineering trade-off studies for the SKA and serves on the international SKA science working group. She is also a member of the scientific advisory committee to the Australian government on the SKA.

Dr. Harvey-Smith is a passionate public advocate for astronomy. She has writtenfor The Conversation and ABC Onlineas well as featuring inWomen’s Health, The Age, The Weekend Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun Herald, The Sunday Telegraph, Al Jazeera English and ABC News 24.In 2012 she was named inthe (Sydney) magazine’slist of Sydney’s 100 most influential people.

Lisa regularly speaks at universities, research institutes, schools, colleges, museums, science festivals and astronomical societies. She is a mentor at the Pia Wadjarri remote community school in Western Australia and teaches science at Leichhardt Public School as part of CSIRO’s ‘Scientists in Schools’ program.

About the talk

The CSIRO is a leading member of an international science and industry collaboration charged with designing a revolutionary radio telescope. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a giant distributed radio telescopecomprising over 1 million separate radio detectorswith unprecedented sensitivity and panoramic imaging capability. By the end of this decade, the SKA will grace areas of outback Western Australian and the Karoo region of South Africa.The vast information-gathering surface area of the telescope, coupled with its wide-field vision, will transform our ability to study the universe.

Although smaller radio telescope networks have been built before, the sheer scale of the SKA telescope brings with it some enormous technological challenges. In real-time, the SKA will stream 100 times more data than the current global internet traffic through 80,000 km of dedicated underground fibre optic cables into a giant supercomputer with a processing power equivalent to the human brain. That's a processing power in excess of 1 Exaflops, or 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 floating-point operations per second. Rising to these challenges will require significant developments in data transport and processing. This is a rich area of academic-industry collaboration in which spin-off technologies will almost certainly follow.

In this talk, CSIRO astronomer Dr. Lisa Harvey-Smith describes the cosmic mysteries the SKA will help to solve and the technological challenges facing this amazing global project.

Shine Dome,9 Gordon Street Australian Capital Territory false DD/MM/YYYY

Contact Information

Event Manager: Mitchell Piercey
Phone: (02) 6201 9462

4:30 PM December 02, 2014

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