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24th February 2009

Cambridge Consultants helps scientists probe deep space

• Engineers tackle enormously complex ‘big science’ problem - how to condition and process signals from the Square Kilometre Array’s 40,000,000 receivers whilst minimising cost and power

Cambridge Consultants has signed a framework agreement with the University of Oxford to provide design services and industrialisation advice to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) programme, an international project to develop the world’s largest telescope. 

When completed in 2020, the SKA radio telescope will be thousands of times more powerful than the existing radio telescopes at Green Bank in the US and Jodrell Bank in the UK.  It will also be vast in scale.  With a collecting area of one million square metres, it will enable scientists to probe deep space, looking back into the early universe, testing Einstein's theory of relativity, learning more about dark matter, even searching for extra-terrestrial life.  To achieve this, the telescope will need to be extremely sensitive over an enormous instantaneous ‘field of view’.  The compact core of the instrument will comprise more than half of the telescope’s antennas and a major supercomputer installation for processing the signals.  Spiralling out from the core, further antenna stations will extend out to 3,000 km across a continent.

The revolutionary design includes an all-electronic system of 250 ‘aperture array’ stations, each of which will be composed of tens of thousands of small antennae fixed to the ground.  Unlike traditional parabola dishes, this sophisticated system can produce many beams for unprecedented flexibility and performance, limited only by the processing power available.  Arrays of radio telescopes are often used to provide high-resolution images of the sky by digitally combining the received signals.  This signal creates a narrow beam which can be directed by adjusting the time delay of the signal from each telescope.  Further signal processing is then used to form images of that part of the sky.  In the case of the SKA, approximately forty-million individual receiver elements will be combined to produce many beams with high sensitivity, providing the very high survey speeds required.  Dr. Andrew Faulkner, Project Engineer for the Square Kilometre Array Design Study (SKADS), a European team of scientists and astronomers led in the UK by a consortium of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, explains: “We are looking at processing an enormous amount of data at astonishing speeds and then stitching it all together to make a system of unprecedented capability to explore the origins of the universe.”

Gary Kemp, Programme Director at Cambridge Consultants explains: “Each of the telescope’s forty-million receiver elements requires analogue signal conditioning and high-speed digital processing, presenting a real challenge in terms of achieving high performance on such a vast scale, while meeting the demands of cost for both build and operation over its lifetime.  We have used our knowledge of analogue and digital chip design and mass-production to help demonstrate the viability of the system, and are currently designing a very low-power analogue system-on-a-chip specifically to address the signal conditioning and calibration requirements.  This will have the ability to self-test and compensate for the frequency characteristics of interconnection cables, and to provide power to other receiver elements on demand.”

Dr. Faulkner concludes:  “Cambridge Consultants’ experience of industrial scale-up for commercial clients combined with an in-depth understanding of the physics involved in a ‘big science’ programme like SKA, make the company an ideal technology transfer partner for the project.  We now have a clear pathway towards the completion of our design by 2010 for exhaustive test and evaluation, enabling phase one of the SKA build to commence in 2013, leading to full operation by 2020.”

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