In 2001 Queensland engineer Aaron Chippendale made a 20 year commitment to help realise an international vision - a vision that could see a $1 billion plus radio telescope built in Australia that would be the largest in the world.
The telescope, known as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will have a million square metres of collecting area.
The project is a collaboration between 34 organisations in 15 countries and Mr Chippendale (pictured), a Queensland University of Technology graduate, said the Australian team was making a major contribution.
The team is led by CSIRO, where Mr Chippendale works as an SKA research support engineer at the Australia Telescope National Facility.
"Australia is renowned for building precision instruments and has taken a leading role in technical telescopes," he said.
"The SKA will enable us to see far back in time and fill in the blanks of what happened after the 'big bang', 13 billion years ago.
"The nucleus of the collecting dishes will be packed into an area within a radius of five square kilometres, while the other half will be spread out over a 3000 kilometre radius.
"It will have a collecting area 100 times greater than the largest telescope ever built and it will reveal the dawn of galaxy formation."
A site for the telescope will be selected next year, with four places under consideration in Western Australia, South Africa, Argentina and China.
These sites are regarded as potentially the best in the world because they are remote and the array would not suffer as much short and long term radio frequency interference as it would in more built-up areas.
A remote location also would make protection of the array less difficult.
Infrastructure and operating costs are also important siting criteria.
The final design is to be decided in 2009 while additional verification and prototype studies will continue until 2013. Construction begins the following year and full operating capacity will be reached in 2020.
Mr Chippendale said this timetable was adopted because technological developments in computing and radio frequency devices would make it feasible for the start of construction of such a telescope to be undertaken within the next decade.
Last reviewed 24 June 2006