The World’s Biggest Telescope will be Called SKA

2 Comments by Alexander Phillips on 20th Feb 2012

The Square Kilometre Array

Animators impression of the SKA's thouands of dishes.

The intimidatingly named SKA or Square kilometree Array is to be the biggest and most capable radio telescope ever constructed. It takes its name from the size of its collecting area, but rather than being a single massive radio dish a km in diameter it will be made up of thousands of smaller dishes. It will comprise of 3,000 dishes, in fact, each approximately 15m wide.

It will be jointly funded by several countries (Australia and New Zealand, along with China, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK and South Africa) which established the SKA Organisation last November; a not-for-profit company that will govern the SKA and make the host site selection.

And this is where the next month’s news will get exciting, for the SKA will be built in one of two short-listed locations – Australia/New Zealand or Southern Africa - who are competing over the project. The billion dollar project will revolutionise our understanding of the Universe by providing answers to questions about its complexity and the fundamental laws of physics as well as insights into the birth of planets and galaxies. We await the announcement of who won the bid in March 2012, with the projected date for SKA being fully operation set at 2024.

The Australian Minister for Innovation, Senator Kim Carr said:

“The SKA represents the future of radio-astronomy research. It needs strong governance to see it move from design phase, through construction, and ultimately to ongoing operation,” he said. “This is a true mega-science project. It will have global reach, scale and scientific and technical ambition. It will drive development in receiver technology, fibre networks, signal processing, software and computing power.”