Work starts in SA on world’s biggest telescope

ON-SITE construction of the world’s biggest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, has begun in South Africa and Australia, following the finalisation of 18 months of global procurement and construction activities.

A statement on the project’s web page said: “The project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with eventually over a square kilometre of collecting area, the facility will address the biggest questions in astrophysics.”

The statement said South Africa’s Karoo region and Western Australia’s Murchison Shire were chosen as co-hosting locations for many scientific and technical reasons, from the atmospherics above the sites, through to the radio quietness from being some of the most remote locations on Earth.

SKA Observatory director-general Philip Diamond said last year that construction was expected to last eight years, with early science opportunities starting in the mid 2020s.

He said it was not just any observatory but one of the mega-science facilities of the 21st century.

The Karoo will host the core of the high and mid-frequency dishes, ultimately extending over the African continent. Australia’s Murchison Shire will host the low-frequency antennas.

The SKA will eventually use thousands of dishes and up to a million low-frequency antennas that will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky much faster than any system currently in existence.

Its unique configuration will give the SKA unrivalled scope in observations, largely exceeding the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Meanwhile, at a conference organised by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (Sarao) last week, it was announced that South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array was involved in an international programme searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The astronomers and engineers on the Breakthrough Listen team have spent the last three years developing and installing the most powerful digital instrumentation ever deployed in the search for techno signatures, integrating the equipment with the MeerKAT control and monitoring systems in co-operation with Sarao engineers.