New electronic devices designed to power antennas of the world’s largest radio telescope are so quiet that they’ll cause less disturbance than a mobile phone on the moon.
The new electronic devices, or SMART boxes, were developed for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Low frequency telescope, a network of radio dishes currently under construction in Western Australia.
Together with its mid-frequency counterpart, which is being built in South Africa, the SKA Low telescope will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope once it comes online later this decade.
SKA Low’s 131,072 dipole antennas will be able to detect the faintest radio signals coming from the most distant reaches of the universe. But this exquisite sensitivity means that the array, located in a remote, barely inhabited area about 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Perth, will be very susceptible to…
