What will ska enable astronomers to do

Whilst 14 member countries are the cornerstone of the SKA, around organisations across about 20 countries are participating in the design and development of the SKA. Hundreds of thousands and eventually up to a million low-frequency antennas will be located in Western Australia.

The SKA is being developed over a phased timeline. Pre-construction development officially started in and has taken place over a period of seven years, involving the detailed engineering design and governance work needed to bring the SKA to construction readiness.

Construction of the SKA is scheduled to begin in , while routine science observations are expected to start in the late s. Each station will contain individual antennas, representing more than , antennas in total. An astronomy-driven IT machine, much more advanced than an ordinary telescope, is being built to collect huge amounts of data that will allow new discoveries about our universe. Initially, the SKA will use a couple of hundred of dishes in South Africa and over thousand low-frequency radio antennas in Australia that will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky much faster than any system currently in existence.

Investigating the origin and evolution of cosmic magnetism. What generates giant magnetic fields in space? The SKA will create three-dimensional maps of cosmic magnets to understand how they stabilise galaxies, influence the formation of stars and planets, and regulate solar and stellar activity. Probing the dark ages — the first black holes and stars.

How were the first black holes and stars formed? The SKA will look back to the Dark Ages, a time before the Universe lit up, to discover how the earliest black holes and stars were formed. The cradle of life searching for life and planets. They were also very complimentary about the level of documentation we have. I was also very pleased with the Cost Audit, which was conducted by an external systems engineering company.

The audit has shown that the quality of the work that has been done — and especially that which has been undertaken by my Deputy Director-General, Joe McMullin, who oversees the engineering activities — has been to a very high standard.

We know the scope of what we intend to build, and we have a strong secure estimate of the cost. We are translating all of that into a Construction Proposal, which will be a high level substantial document that provides something of a cap to the pyramid created by the many thousands of other documents which have come before it.

These include the highly technical engineering interface control documents. At the top of this pyramid, the Construction Proposal will sit with another document, the Observatory Establishment and Delivery Plan, which is essentially the plan for how we will operate the telescopes once they have been built and, indeed, the plan for how we will run the observatory.

Those two key documents are now in the final stages of preparation and are being reviewed internally. The intent is then for us to put those documents before the Board later this year, and related to that, the Council of the new Observatory, the intergovernmental organisation that sits under the treaty, will also hopefully come into existence at some point this year. On that will sit all the governments involved in the project, and they will look at the construction proposals and at all the reviews and will hopefully then give us the green light to begin construction.

That, of course, is dependent upon them having collected funding to enable us to move forward. From the technical side, then, the key things moving forwards are the finalisation of the two plans, which is the culmination of almost a decades worth of work; and on the political side, it is to get the treaty ratified, the establishment of the observatory, and then to receive the go signal. This is what we are working towards. Please note, this article will also appear in the third edition of our new quarterly publication.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Sign in. Log into your account. Forgot your password?

Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Recover your password.