Projects and facilities

The go-ahead has been given to build what will be the world’s largest radio telescope network. Last week the council of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) gave the green light to construct the €2bn Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Australia and southern Africa. To be complete by 2028, it is anticipated that the SKA will operate for the next 50 years.

As its name suggests, the SKA is a facility that intends to have a total collecting area of 1 km2, achieved by spreading out thousands of individual dishes in southern Africa as well as a million wire antennas in Australia. SKA is designed to provide astronomers with unprecedented views of the first stars in the universe and observations of gravitational waves via the radio emissions from pulsars, among other things.

That initial design, however, proved too ambitious and in 2013 officials concentrated on building a much smaller preliminary facility known as SKA1, which was to be complete by 2018. It would feature 250 mid-frequency radio dishes and 250,000 low-frequency dipole antenna to keep costs below a cap of €674m. Despite further woes with members dropping out, such as Germany, and increases in the baseline cost of the project to €900m, that timeline was delayed. Yet a big boost for the project came in March 2019 when Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the UK signed the SKA convention treaty in Rome. That came into effect earlier this year after five countries – including Australia, South Africa and the UK – ratified the convention, creating the SKAO in the process.

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