The SKA and the Unknown Unknowns

TL;DR

The paper emphasizes the importance of exploring the unknown in SKA to maximize discovery potential, highlighting the role of human ingenuity and proposing the exploration of spectral transients within the observational parameter space.

Contribution

It advocates for maintaining an exploration of the unknown approach in SKA, integrating human capacity considerations, and identifying new observational regions like spectral transients.

Findings

Exploration of the unknown is vital for SKA's discovery potential.

A new observational parameter space region involves time-variable spectral patterns.

Building slightly less collecting area can enhance SKA's flexibility and discovery opportunities.

Abstract

As new scientists and engineers join the SKA project and as the pressures come on to maintain costs within a chosen envelope it is worth restating and updating the rationale for the 'Exploration of the Unknown' (EoU). Maintaining an EoU philosophy will prove a vital ingredient for realizing the SKA's discovery potential. Since people make the discoveries enabled by technology a further axis in capability parameter space, the'human bandwidth' is emphasised. Using the morphological approach pioneered by Zwicky, a currently unexploited region of observational parameter space can be identified viz: time variable spectral patterns on all spectral and angular scales, one interesting example would be 'spectral transients'. We should be prepared to build up to 10 percent less collecting area for a given overall budget in order to enhance the ways in which SKA1 can be flexibly utilized.