KEY POINTS:
Just south of Warkworth, Sergei Gulyaev points from his car to the dish in the verdant valley on the left. "Beautiful," he murmurs. At first glance, it's difficult to appreciate his aesthetic sensibility - the 12-metre satellite dish in the paddock seems rather ho hum.
Up close, when the thing rotates, swivels and tilts at a brisk five degrees per second, it's possible to marvel at its engineering prowess. But the real beauty Gulyaev is talking about is something else - the heavenly images this cupped instrument will soon receive.
Billed as "New Zealand's first radio telescope" and due to launch on Wednesday, it also looks into a very distant past. "Whenever we look with the help of a radio telescope, we can observe the glow of the hot universe," says Gulyaev. "We see this firewall - the wall of fire of the early universe."
The lone dish, built by AUT University, is a tiny part of a very big plan. A plan which, if it comes off, could see New Zealand participate in a ¬2 billion ($4.2 billion) international "mega-science" project.
Similar in scope to the just completed Franco-Swiss Large Hadron Collider, the Square Kilometre Array is an audacious scheme to combine 5000 dishes, spread out over vast distances, into a one giant radio antenna.
The idea is to make a radio telescope so powerful, it can not only observe celestial objects in galaxies far, far away, but also look back in time, in never before seen detail, to the emergence of the universe.
Gulyaev, who heads AUT University's Institute for Radiophysics and Space Research, says the square kilometre array will provide a 100 times greater sensitivity than any existing radio telescope.
The last time such a quantum leap in astronomy occurred was in 1609 when Galileo built his optical telescope and saw the moons of Jupiter. It's a mind-boggling notion - looking back 13.7 billion years to the moment when it all began with a big bang.
What exactly does Gulyaev see? In truth he's not really "seeing" fire, but picking up a cosmic microwave glow, an ancient light - radiation that streamed from the newborn universe when it was still a glowing ball of plasma. The fire wall is the distant horizon of what radio telescopes - even big arrays - can "see".
Penetrating beyond the plasma is possible, but requires a different kind of astronomy using neutrino telescopes. It's also to venture into the space where time didn't exist - or should that be doesn't exist? I don't think tenses matter back there.
But looking back far as we can, says Gulyaev, is incredible, especially when understanding the implications of how long it takes for invisible light (radio waves) in the electromagnetic spectrum to get here. He talks, matter-of-factly, about observing a quasar (quasi-stellar radio source) of the southern sky 4.5 billion light years away.
"So of course it doesn't exist anymore, but we still receive data from it and we can plot its image."
Receiving data from celestial objects - such as quasars, pulsars and active galactic nuclei - and plotting their image is what AUT's $1 million Warkworth telescope will do.
On site, a rag-tag international team of very smart people are hard at work.
There's the wisecracking American from Michigan, Bob Cato, who has 22 years experience in the dish business and is overseeing the Patriot Antenna Systems installation. Cato greets Gulyaev like a long lost friend and promptly tells him on launch day, he and Lewis are planning to take the day off.
Lewis is Lewis Woodburn, the slave driver site manager for the job, a former TVNZ satellite expert, now with AUT. Mark Godwin from Manchester, England, who built the control system for the dish is inside the mounting column calling out commands: "Keep going, more, stop, OK, slowly, now reverse, stop, OK lock it up there." German post-graduate student Martin Steinbach is on site.
The engineering computer science specialist is developing an interface so the dish can be operated via fibre optic cable from a remote location. Then there's radio astronomer Tim Natusch, also with AUT, who is tasked with getting the receivers working and has played a significant role in testing to synchronise the dish with Australian telescopes.
At the moment, the telescope is a work in progress. The mechanical control system is functioning, allowing the dish to turn and tilt at speed to point at selected parts of the sky. In a couple of months the receivers will go live and the antenna will take its "first light", which is digitised and processed by supercomputer.
The fibre-optic link to take data to the supercomputer isn't in place yet either. But testing has already been done, by physically transporting stored data to the big number cruncher at Weta Workshops which did the Lord of the Rings animations. The other supercomputer likely to be linked up is the IBM machine, Blue Fern, at Canterbury University.
The dish is also missing, but soon to get, its heart - a $300,000 hydrogen atomic clock. This most accurate kind of clock available on earth is needed to provide precision time stamps of the dish's recordings - vital to correlate all the dishes in the array to work as one.
New Zealand has climbed aboard the square kilometre array project on the coat-tails of Australia, which has been shortlisted with South Africa as one of the two potential host sites.
Which gets the go-ahead, and gets to spend the billions of dollars of attendant international funding, is decided in 2011. Meanwhile, both countries, and their partners, are doing all they can to position themselves as the frontrunner.
Gulyaev believes New Zealand's participation gives the Australian bid a technological edge that will be hard to beat. New Zealand sites would extend the scheme's "baseline" - the distance between the core and the outer reaches of the array - from the 3000 kilometres available across Australia, to 5500 kilometres.
The longer the baseline, the better the resolution of the telescope. In this instance, it's the equivalent of moving up from a 5 megapixel digital camera to a 20 megapixel model.
Sounds good in theory, but Gulyaev admits there are technological hurdles ahead - including how to synchronise so many dishes over such a long distance and how to process the gargantuan amounts of data. Not to mention the funding.
While the Australian Government has put up $150 million for its pathfinder phase of the array, New Zealand has yet to stump up with hard cash. In August, Prime Minister Helen Clark announced support for the Australian bid and a joint officials group is looking at how we can participate.
But sooner, rather than later, New Zealand will need to put up as much as $20 million to properly join the race. For that outlay, Gulyaev envisages two New Zealand sites - one in the North and one in the South Island - with one comprising a small array of about four dishes in close proximity.
The New Zealand sites, synchronised via fibre optic cable to a core of 45 dishes in West Australia would provide a valuable proof of concept. In other words, that electronic very large baseline interferometry works.
AUT joined the square kilometre array effort four years ago, thanks to the efforts of Gulyaev and Royal Society fellow, Sir Ian Axford, who convinced Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation that New Zealand could bring value to the project.
Russian-born Gulyaev came here 10 years ago - a significant brain gain for the country. With a Doctor of Science qualification from Moscow State University in astronomy and astrophysics, his first job was at AUT's Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute. He's since returned to his first love and set up the Institute for Radiophysics and Space Research offering masters and PhD courses.
Gulyaev says he has always had two passions - the violin and the stars. "The stars won, but I still play the violin." As a four-year-old he remembers holding his father's hand while he walked looking skywards. "I was just looking up amazed by the view of the sky. Later, when I started reading some first books on astronomy, it was decided."
Today, it's the potential view from the array that has him excited. "When several radio telescopes work together, it's like my passion for music - when an orchestra plays one beautiful symphony simultaneously with every instrument working perfectly."
Natusch sums up the enormous potential: "We've got a laboratory sitting out there in the universe - all we have to do is to figure out how to collect the information from it."
Given its policies of promoting science and knowledge economy industries such as information and communication technology, it's hard to see how the Government can ignore this mega-science project. Not to mention the prestige and inspiration participation would bring.
The Government has shown it can move quickly and throw money at sporting events like the America's Cup and the Rugby World Cup. It remains to be seen whether scientific endeavour will be afforded the same sort of special treatment.
