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Super-science projects like the CERN collider in Switzerland or NASA's launch facilities in America they're always overseas.

But now Australia might have its first super-science project. It won't collide things or launch things; it'll be an enormous radio telescope.

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Whenever a new telescope's built, it's often ten times better than its predecessors. But this one, called the Square Kilometre Array, the SKA, will be a massive leap forward.

Professor Peter Quinn

Right now with the SKA we're about to take a step up but not five, not ten, not a hundred, not a thousand, but ten thousand so this machine is ten thousand times more capable of exploring the universe than its predecessors. Now that's just mind blowing. Even for an astronomer it's mind blowing. You can't imagine how impressive that is and you can't imagine what the discovery potential that introduces to science in general.

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The hope is the super-scope will be built in Murchison a remote part of Western Australia. We drove nine hours through a desert-full of wild flowers to check out the site.

Dr Graham Phillips

One of the things I can't wait for the telescope to investigate is this new theory called quintessence. Basically it's this mysterious force pervading the entire universe.

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The dark force is definitely there, pushing galaxies apart, but what is it? It's dubbed dark energy.

Professor Ray Norris

We don't know what dark energy is what it is, is a label. So imagine the whole universe is filled with this thing something we don't actually know what it is, we don't know how it works but it's a property of space and its filling the entire universe and that's about all you can say about it.

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It may be dark energy is Quintessence.

Professor Lawrence Krauss

It comes from a word I've actually used in a book of mine: the fifth essence of Aristotle where air, earth, fire and water were parts of the normal universe and the fifth essence, which was like the ether, permeated everything else and so we've adopted that word to sound scholarly I suppose.

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Quintessence would be a field generated by undiscovered particles in the universe... just as an electric field is generated by charged particles.

Professor Lawrence Krauss

It's like if there were a background electric field in the universe, we'd measure it and wonder why it was there. But it could be that there's some extra charges. It turns out that some people have suggested that there is, not an electric field, but some other kind of fields in nature that permeate all of space.

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One of these other fields could be quintessence... and the SKA might be able to reveal it.

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These are the desert plains the SKA will be built on. Their attraction... is no-one's around.

Antony Schinckel

This site is absolutely unique in the world. The most unique thing about it is it's away from radio frequency interference. Everything mankind does these days telephones, cars, microwave ovens refrigerators everything like this creates radio frequency noise, and it's making radio astronomy extremely difficult.

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And this is what the super telescope might look like. Stunningly, it won't be one giant dish; more than a thousand smaller dishes will be linked together. They'll form the equivalent of an incredible one kilometre by one kilometre dish... hence the name Square Kilometre Array.

Antony Schinckel

They'll be clustered in a focused section about 5 kilometres in diameter, and then they'll be staged out to radiuses of 150 kilometres. And then a few will be scattered across the entire country and then a couple of them will be all the way out in New Zealand as well.

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Eighteen countries are chipping in to build the telescope, either in Australia or South Africa's also on the shortlist.

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Each country has made promo videos this is South Africa's... and each is demonstrating its capability by building a smaller telescope. Australia's is called ASKAP Australia's SKA Pathfinder.

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A staggering 54 road-trains are bringing ASKAP up from Perth in pieces. And it's no slouch of a telescope itself.

Antony Schinckel

ASKAP will be an enormous radio telescope. In fact it will be ten times for sensitive and more powerful than any other survey radio telescope in the world now. So it's a huge step forward.

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Is doesn't come in a flat-pack exactly, but there are 7,200 pieces to assemble into 36 separate antennas. There's no Allen Key; construction involves heavy engineering. Because the antennas have to make very precise measurements they can't sway in strong winds. And this is what ASKAP will look like. It won't observe individual stars or galaxies: it'll look at the sky in its entirety.

Professor Peter Quinn

It sees a very big chunk of the sky at one time so you imagine a piece of the sky which is about the same size as the Southern Cross in the sky every little dish of the ASKAP can see that much of the sky.

Antony Schinckel

The secret to this is that normally a radio telescope has a single detector at its focus. The ASKAP telescopes that CSIRO is building out here have an array of detectors at their focus about 188.

Professor Peter Quinn

With 36 dishes you can map the whole sky very rapidly in fact in about a year you can map the sky with a great, great depth with the ASKAP telescope.

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One antenna's already been put together... an impressive sight, towering 18 metres above the desert.

Dr Graham Phillips

The dish is a perfect parabolic shape. It's 12 metres from one side to the other.

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It's the equivalent of the mirror in an optical telescope, but rather than collecting light it gathers radio-wave radiation.

Dr Graham Phillips

And that radiation is focused down into a disc about a metre across.

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This one-metre disk is the receiver, which converts the extraordinarily weak radio waves into electronic signals for processing.

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Both telescopes will peer back to when galaxies were young. The SKA will see their very birth... a cosmic period known as the Dark Ages.

Dr Graham Phillips

The Dark Ages... sounds mysterious doesn't it? But basically astronomers know quite a bit about the universe just after the big bang. And they know quite a bit about the universe a little later, after the first galaxies had formed. But that in between time has always been mysterious. Until now. This telescope should shed light on the Dark Ages.

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We do have computer models, and they predict there were no stars then, just vast clouds of mainly hydrogen.

Professor Lawrence Krauss

But science is an empirical discipline. And if we really want to know we've got to look out and see. And so we've got to try to get direct evidence and that means taking our telescopes back to the earliest stars and trying to figure out when they formed, what kind of stars formed, where they formed.

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The SKA will be so powerful it'll gaze right back in time.

Professor Peter Quinn

We will get back to a point in the history of the universe which we call first light.

Professor Lawrence Krauss

Because basically you'd have this dark universe out there then would suddenly pop out with little jewels as stars began to form.

Professor Peter Quinn

That's like page one, chapter one, of the book.

Professor Peter Quinn

It's like having a DVD running backwards to the beginning of time it's a great amazing opportunity to see the entire cosmic story.

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Our demonstration, ASKAP telescope should be up and observing by the beginning of 2013.

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And as for Australia's first super-science project, we should know if we win the SKA by next year.