as cap is a radio telescope that we're building in Western Australia it's a new generation of radio telescope which will be able to survey the whole sky to great depths and what we want to find out is how do galaxies evolve over time so the

data comes off the telescope in raw form and gets transmitted by optical fiber to the supercomputer Center in Perth at

that point the data gets processed and it gets converted into images of the sky and those images will be made available

to astronomers worldwide we've asked up

the data volumes are truly enormous and so to make it easier to archive it and

also to make it easier for the astronomers who are going to use it the data was actually processed quite a lot before it gets to be archived so that raises a new paradigm in a sense if you

want to be very sure that your data quality is very good

before you do archive it so the great

thing about archives is that you put the data in in a central location and then

anybody can get it from there the best way to get return on the investment of

this big telescope was to have completely open access data policy there

were two reasons we did this one is because of the internationalization of astronomy generally the sky is up there for anybody to look at the second reason

was we've got these big teams set up who

know the projects they want to do it's important to keep them honest it's

important that they publish and do the

stuff with the data they've got they can't just leave it languishing you know

for 10 years and then oh yes well maybe I'll do something was Daytona they can't

do that anymore because the data is freely available to anybody and somebody

might nip in and steal their idea Open

Data I think is really crucial to getting the best science from your telescope we're building a very expensive telescope and it's important that the best science gets done so let's say for example have a really good idea for a science project and I want to look at this patch of sky over here I go away and I look at it and I do my own thing then the data sits in the archive and somebody from somewhere else might have a another completely different idea to do with the same data patch they will go away extract the data from the archive have look at it do their own clever science and publish something completely different so therefore the same

observation you've got two pieces of clever science one piece that the original person never even thought of and so that's the really great advantage in having open access data the questions

that it can answer are maybe questions that you haven't even thought of yet and that that's I think the beauty of a data archive so I can carry out an experiment

to do what I want to do because I've had that idea but then maybe in the future you know science always moves on and there's always different things to do so

in the future somebody I'll have a completely different question that I haven't thought of and they can use that data to answer their questions they don't need to go back and take expensive telescope time they can just look at the data that exists already to help answer their questions