A giant telescope one kilometre square that can see back to the origins of the galaxies will be discussed at an international conference in Sydney tomorrow.

Ten countries are meeting in Sydney from Tuesday to Thursday this week to plan a revolutionary new radio telescope 60 times bigger than the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Scientists and engineers from Australia, The Netherlands, Canada, China, France, Japan, the UK, the USA, India and Germany will come together at the CSIRO-hosted meeting to discuss possible designs and sites for the one-square-kilometre telescope, which will start construction around 2005 and cost $500 million.

The project offers the chance to develop some of the radical new technology the telescope will need. Australia is among the countries being considered as a possible site for the telescope.

Australia and The Netherlands favour a telescope made of individual high-tech electronic elements that resemble carpet tiles.

"It would look as if you'd hacked the Parkes telescope apart and spread the pieces around on the ground," says Professor Ron Ekers, Director of CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility.

Clever electronics will reconsitute the pieces into a whole telescope. Each 'tile' will be a 'smart surface' with embedded computer processors. As the radio waves hit each tile, they will be processed on the spot.

"You don't have to wave thumping great lumps of steel around in the air in order to get an image of the sky," says Professor Ekers.

Driving the plans for the telescope is astronomers' hunger to see the birth of the galaxies - before the first stars formed.

"In the last five years we've found galaxies that weren't supposed to exist - extremely early ones," Professor Ekers explains. "They are kinds we've never seen before. Nobody understands how these things formed so early."

"This one-square-kilometre telescope will be so sensitive it will be able to see the incredibly faint signals from those earliest days," he said.

"We are trying to build a bridge between the cosmic ripples way back in the very early universe, which is what the COBE satellite found, and the actual galaxies that came along later."

To keep the price down this telescope has to cost about the same per square metre as a marble floor.

"Computing power is doubling every eighteen months," said Professor Ekers. "The technology is coming along. By the time we build the telescope it will be there."

"This telescope will revolutionise astronomy."

The Sydney workshop will discuss a range of design ideas and the procedures needed for deciding on the telescope's final form and location, he said.

More information contact:
Professor Ron Ekers, Director, CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility,
02 9372 4301 (bh) or 02 9869 8656 (ah)
or
Dr Ray Norris, Head of Astrophysics, CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility 02 9372 4416 (bh), (02) 9639 9591 (ah) or 0417 288307 mobile