By Melissa Davies
New Zealand is now officially in the running to host an ambitious science project which will be able to detect whether there is life on other planets.
The Government has announced a joint bid with Australia to be the home of a revolutionary telescope which has a discovery power 10,000 times stronger than anything available now.
The telescope has been built as part of a plan to score brownie points with the judging panel who will choose where to base what many call the mega science project of the 21st century.
"The project of the scale of the Apollo mission or the Hubble Space Telescope or Large Hadron Collider may land in New Zealand," says radio astronomy researcher Professor Sergei Gulyaev.
Australia and New Zealand are one of two shortlisted sites, the other being South Africa.
The Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, will be built on the winning the site.
With 4,000 antennas, the SKA's discovery potential is thousands of times greater than any telescope in the world.
The telescope is so powerful that astronomers will be able to see back to the formation of the first stars and galaxies and even examine where magnetic fields in the universe come from.
The $3.1 billion project will be backed by funding from 19 countries around the world. The economic spinoffs will be significant and Australasia could be at the forefront of that.
"During this period there will be very important innovations in the information computing technology sector, in mechanical and electrical engineering, in areas of data transport and data storage," Professor Gulyaev says.
Professor Gulyaev says New Zealand would also become a draw card for talented young scientists.
Final decisions on who will host SKA will be made in 2012 by an international panel of radio astronomers. The array will then take six to eight years to construct.
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