Having joined up in January, India is set to be a key player among 16 nations in one of the 21st century’s grand scientific projects: humanity’s biggest-ever telescope. This confluence of radio astronomy and artificial intelligence (AI) will help observe the births and deaths of the first stars and search for habitable planets and extraterrestrial life.
The €2.2 billion ($2.4) Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO) is an ambitious project whose 16 member nations also include South Africa, Australia, UK, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
For this, India has set aside Rs 12.5 billion ($150 million) for a facility in Pune (156km east of Mumbai), a city abuzz with radio astronomy research activity. This facility will be a regional data center equipped with supercomputers to process the humongous amount of scientific data amassed by the telescope.
With the help of radio interferometry, astronomers can combine signals from many antennas or telescopes to create an image that is sharper and brighter than what would be possible from a single antenna dish. This technology effectively helps scan large swathes of the sky with radio telescope dish antennas spread many kilometers apart but functioning as a single observatory.
The global observatory, with thousands of units spread over two continents – in South Africa and in Western Australia – and its nerve center in a third continent, near Manchester, England, has thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide networking to develop innovative technologies. They will use SKAO to document cosmic data to fill 1.5 million laptops every year.
“The idea is to start training this year (using AI to decode scientific information) with approximately two petabytes of data archived through GMRT. We will use this to develop a small model demonstrating that India is ready to receive and analyze the data,” Prof Yashwant Gupta, director of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) in Pune, told RT.