Did you know the SKA will be so sensitive that it will be able to detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away?

  • The data collected by the SKA in a single day would take nearly two million years to playback on an ipod.
  • The SKA central computer will have the processing power of about one hundred million PCs.
  • The SKA will use enough optical fibre to wrap twice around the Earth!
  • The dishes of the SKA will produce 10 times the global internet traffic.
  • The aperture arrays in the SKA could produce more than 100 times the global internet traffic.
  • The SKA will generate enough raw data to fill 15 million 64 GB iPods every day!
  • The SKA supercomputer will perform 1018 operations per second – equivalent to the number of stars in three million Milky Way galaxies – in order to process all the data that the SKA will produce.
  • The SKA will be so sensitive that it will be able to detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away.
  • The SKA will contain thousands of antennas with a combined collecting area of about one square kilometre (that’s 1 000 000 square metres!).
  • Analysts estimate the London Olympics was the most data-heavy yet – with some 60 Gbytes, the equivalent of 3,000 photographs, travelling across the network in the Olympic Park every second. This however is only equivalent to the data rate from about half a low frequency aperture array station in SKA phase one.
Nicholas Kratzer (b. 1486/7, d. after 1550) was astronomer and astrologer to King Henry VIII.View full profile

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