Australia chosen to co-host world’s largest radio telescope31 May 2012Australia has been chosen, along with South Africa, to host the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built. Set to become one of the great scientific projects of this century, the $1.9 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will enable astronomers to look at tens of millions of far distant galaxies, investigate the nature of gravity, and look for life on other planets. The Array will be made up of thousands of radio-wave antennas linked together by high bandwidth optical fibre. The antennas work together and act as a single large instrument with a collecting area of approximately one square kilometre. Professor Linda Kristjanson, Vice Chancellor of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, said that the SKA would consolidate Australia’s position as a world leader in radio-astronomy. All the low frequency aperture arrays for the SKA will be built in Australia, while the dishes for Phase II of the project and the mid-frequency aperture arrays will be built in Southern Africa. The core site for the SKA in Australia will be the CSIRO-operated Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory (MRO), some 350 kilometres north-east of Geraldton in Western Australia. Australia is teamed with New Zealand for the SKA project. Both countries worked together to establish the site in Western Australia as a candidate for the SKA and maximise participation in the SKA process. Due to be fully operation by 2024, the internationally funded SKA is expected to give a significant economic boost in construction, engineering and IT. More information |