The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a multi-billion dollar international project to build the world’s largest radio telescope.
Co-located primarily in South Africa and Western Australia, the SKA will be a collection of hundreds of thousands of radio antennas with a combined collecting area equivalent to approximately one million square metres, or one square kilometre.
The project is one of the largest scientific endeavours in history and will be more than 10 times more sensitive and much faster at surveying galaxies than any current radio telescope. The unprecedented flow of data from the telescope will be supported by supercomputing facilities with several times the processing speed of any current supercomputer and one trillion times the computing power that landed men on the Moon.
The SKA will use three different configurations of radio antennas – Australia’s Murchison region is hosting the low-frequency component at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory, while the mid to high frequency infrastructure will be based in South Africa’s Karoo desert.
You can learn more about the SKA project from the SKAO (Square Kilometre Array Observatory) and SKA In Australia websites.