Square Kilometre Array

The Square Kilometre Array intends to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with a square kilometer of collecting area.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a project that intends to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with a square kilometer of collecting area. The SKA will use several high-frequency dishes and low frequency and mid-frequency aperture array telescopes. The dishes will be located over thousands of kilometers across Africa and the aperture array antennas will extend to about 200km from the core regions in Africa and Australia. The telescopes will be arranged in multiple spiral arm configurations, with the dishes extending to vast distances from the central cores. The system will be designed to act either as one gigantic telescope or as multiple smaller telescopes and any combination in between. The project was originally conceived in 1991 with an international working group set up in 1993. This led to the signing of the first Memorandum of Agreement in 2000. Considerable early development work then followed up to the short listing of potential sites in 2006. This culminated in the commencement of PrepSKA in 2008 leading to the SKA Organization becoming a legal entity in 2011 and then shortly the SKA site selection in 2012. Requests for proposals were then sent out and received in 2013, which also saw evaluation and costing fixed. Construction of Phase 1 is scheduled to take place from 2018 to 2023 with early science in 2020 by providing an operational array of telescopes capable of carrying out some of the key science set by the community, before scaling up to the full SKA by the late 2020s. The Office for the SKA Organization (SKAO) at Jodrell Bank is responsible for coordinating the global activities of the Square Kilometre Array project which includes engineering, science, site evaluation, operations, and public outreach. Eleven countries are currently members of the SKA Organization: Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.