The SKA project

South Africa is ready to host the world's most powerful radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in southern Africa. Following an initial identification of sites suitable for the SKA by the International SKA Steering Committee in 2006, southern Africa and Australia are the finalists. A consortium of the major international science funding agencies, in consultation with the SKA Science and Engineering Committee (SSEC), will announce the selected site for the SKA in 2012.

At about 50 – 100 times more sensitive than any other radio telescope on Earth, the SKA will be able to probe the edges of our Universe. It will help us to answer fundamental questions in astronomy, physics and cosmology, including the nature of dark energy and dark matter. It will be a powerful time machine that scientists will use to go back in time to explore the origins of the first galaxies, stars and planets. If there is life somewhere else in the Universe, the SKA will help us find it.

The construction of the SKA is expected to cost about 1.5 billion Euro. The operations and maintenance of a large telescope normally cost about 10% of the capital costs per year. That means the international SKA consortium would be spending approximately 100 to 150 million Euro per year on the telescope. It is expected that a significant portion of the capital, operations and maintenance costs would be spent in the host country. South Africa offers a competitive and affordable solution for constructing, operating and maintaining the SKA.

The SKA in Africa

A major component of the SKA telescope will be an extensive array of approximately 3 000 antennas. Half of these will be concentrated in a 5 km diameter central region, and the rest will be distributed out to 3 000 km from this central concentration. We are partnering with Namibia, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique and Zambia to host these stations. The African Union fully supports the continent's SKA ambitions.

These antennas will all be connected via a data communications network to a very large and powerful data processing facility on the core SKA site in the Northern Cape Province. The combined collecting area of all these antennas will add up to one square kilometre. The telescope will be operated and monitored remotely from Cape Town, where the operations and science centre will be located.

The SKA will be one of the largest scientific research facilities in the world and will consolidate Southern Africa as a major hub for astronomy in the world. It will attract the best scientists and engineers to work in Africa and will provide unrivalled opportunities for scientists and engineers from African countries to engage with transformational science and cutting edge instrumentation and to collaborate in joint projects with the most renowned universities and research institutions in the world.

Hosting the SKA would be a major accomplishment for the Astronomy Geographic Advantage Programme (AGAP), an initiative by the South African government to establish a hub of world-class astronomy facilities in Southern Africa. Other major astronomy facilities in the region include the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) in the Karoo, and the HESS gamma ray telescope in Namibia.

Why in the Northern Cape?

The Karoo region of the Northern Cape Province is ideal for radio astronomy, because it is remote and sparsely populated, with a very dry climate. There is minimal radio frequency interference from man-made sources such as cellular phones and broadcast transmitters, and the lack of commercial activity in the area will ensure that this radio quietness will continue into the future.

South Africa's Parliament passed the Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act of 2007, which declares the Northern Cape Province as an astronomy advantage area. An area of 12.5 million hectares around the proposed core of the SKA will be protected as a radio astronomy reserve, with strict regulations controlling the generation and transmission of interfering radio signals in the reserve and the area around it.

SKA collaboration

The MeerKAT scientists and engineers are fully embedded in the international SKA project, participating in technical committees and working groups set up by the SKA Project Development Office (SPDO) and supported by the PrepSKA (European FP7) and TDP (USA/NSF) programmes.

Bilateral agreements have been established with key institutions involved with the SKA to improve collaboration efficiency, including the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, the University of California at Berkeley and Caltech, as well as with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) of the USA.

In South Africa, the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory and the South African Astronomical Observatory participate in the MeerKAT Project, while researchers and students at many universities in Africa also actively participate.

The SKA Project's head office is in Rosebank, Johannesburg, while the MeerKAT engineering office is in Pinelands, Cape Town.

The Department of Science and Technology funds the SKA Project via the National Research Foundation.