SETTING-UP A GLOBAL NETWORK OF TELESCOPES: BRICS INTELLIGENT TELESCOPE AND DATA NETWORK

SETTING-UP A GLOBAL NETWORK OF TELESCOPES

Brics Intelligent Telescope and Data Network

“The idea of the Flagship Programme was to develop something that would leverage the existing and future facilities that BRICS countries have or have access to, in particular to develop a really internationally competitive Astronomy programme.”

• BY NADINE SIMS

he Flagship Programme is a joint venture between BRICS countries that will initially use existing infrastructure in each country to build a network of telescopes, employing their respective strengths to explore and survey the cosmos. The concept of the BRICS Intelligent Telescope and Data Network (BITDN), as it is known, was first proposed in 2017 at an annual BRICS Astronomy Working Group (BAWG) meeting. “The idea of the Flagship Programme was to develop something that would leverage the existing and future facilities that BRICS countries have or have access to. In particular to develop a really internationally competitive astronomy programme.” David Buckley from the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) explains. The BRICS Astronomy Working Group first meeting was in 2015, after initial discussions about ways to promote Science and Technology in each country. Astronomy then quickly emerged as one of the main themes, which has now developed into a fullyfledged BRICS Astronomy programme, with the working group meeting annually.

It has since morphed into a transcontinental Flagship

Project - the BRICS Intelligent Telescope and Data Network. At the beginning, when the programme was adopted by the working group and the secretariat of South Africa, they were told to think big and out of the box.

“This is what led to what some people might think of as an outlandishly ambitious programme. But this is something that we believe, certainly in this current proposal, is something that is fully realisable with what we consider to be a relatively modest amount of investment,” Buckley explains.

After the first discussions about the proposed Flagship project, an announcement call was made in early 2018 and 18 proposals were discussed at that year’s meeting in South Africa.

The concept notes were reviewed and it was decided that as far as possible, proposals where there was a common theme, would be combined into a bigger proposal.

“What came out of that were three common themes. One of them was on transient follow-up and transient astronomy. The other was on big data and big compute infrastructure in the era of large surveys like SKA and LSST. The last one was a cosmology-related study of neutral hydrogen 21centimetre.”

The three proposals were developed and then presented at the 2019 annual BAWG meeting, in Rio de Janeiro. Buckley explained that two of the three were then combined and merged into one proposal.

“It was already clearly apparent that there were excellent synergies between those two proposals and in fact, both talked to different aspects of those proposals, so it made imminent sense to combine them. And that’s what the final proposal we have on the table now represents,” he said. One of the most important aspects of a project of this magnitude is the potential opportunities and the socioeconomic effects. In the current proposal, that can be found on the BAWG website, there is support for human capacity development of young researchers and students. This includes funding of post-doctoral fellowships, scholarships and co-supervision with other BRICS countries.

“Of course the technical collaboration opportunities are also quite apparent, because hardware and instrumentation forms one important leg of this proposal, there is excellent potential for engineers, software developers, and instrument makers to collaborate and work together.”

Equally as important are the scientific reverberations, which will surely be felt for generations to come. For instance, the big astronomy survey programme that the working group has an interest in leveraging is the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which is due to start it 10 year optical sky survey in 2024.

“It will conduct a 10 yearsurvey of the Southern Sky, and it will be the deepest and most complete survey ever undertaken,” explained Buckley.

“Setting up this network and bringing their resources together could lead to great scientific advancement, though an undertaking of this size is not without its challenge.”

The other major large project that could potentially be leveraged is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), in South Africa and in Australia. The radio telescope is due to begin operations in approximately six years and will be the largest and most technologically advanced instrument of its kind.

Setting up this network and bringing resources together could lead to great scientific advancement, though an undertaking of this size is not without its challenge.

“The telescopes that we jointly have or that we have within our countries are quite a heterogeneous collection of telescopes of different ages and capabilities. Nonetheless, our experience in South Africa has shown it is a tractable problem.” Also, a challenge that is central to the Flagship Project is to efficiently process large data sets and subsequently extract important information. As the BITDN proposal explains, developing systems that can effectively analyse vast amounts of data is an integral part of how we approach science and technology within the 21st century.

“It should also be clear that it would have a huge impact on aspects like human capacity development, development of young researchers within our countries and of course, the alignment with developments of The Fourth Industrial Revolution paradigm, for example, machine learning and artificial intelligence,” he says.

The project will be implemented in a phased approach with the potential to expand. The first phase and initial focus will be on networking the existing facilities in each region, for a more efficient response to transient alerts and survey follow-up science. Fortunately, SAAO does have some experience in this, with their new initiative that started in 2021.

The plan is to essentially turn their existing Sutherland observatory site into an integrated intelligent machine for transient and survey follow-up. Buckley explained that this project is going very successfully and the idea is that it would expand within this programme to be something similar within all of the BRICS countries.

The second phase would primarily be paying attention to the development of new infrastructure. This is to aid in wider, deeper and faster transient detection facilities. A great deal of help in this phase will be coming from China and Russia.

“So already, telescope design work has begun by the two respective groups. One of the initial things we could do with our programme would be to do some design trade-off studies. To work together on looking for the potentials for designs and so on and maybe also into detector technology as well,” Buckley notes. The second phase also brings with it the prospect of being able to survey and monitor the sky, in its entirety and continuously for approximately an hour each day, ultimately rendering this global network of optical telescopes unique today.