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The SKA Project
World’s Largest Radio Telescope
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Square Kilometre Array (SKA)
The SKA project is not a top-secret SKA reggae album in production or an underground SKA festival; it’s something much bigger. SKA, which stands for Square Kilometre Array, is a global effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope. Just how big, you ask? A radio telescope with a square kilometer (one million square meters) of collecting area.
Scheduled to be completed in the late 2020s, the collection of antennae and dishes will use its unparalleled sensitivity to peer deeper into the past and scan the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life.
The SKA will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky much faster than any system currently in existence by using thousands of dishes and up to a million low-frequency antennas.
Its unique configuration will give the SKA unrivaled scope in observations, easily exceeding the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The SKA will be able to image huge areas of sky in parallel, a feat that no survey telescope has ever achieved on this scale with this level of sensitivity. With a range of other large telescopes in the optical and infrared being built and launched into space over the coming decades, the SKA will perfectly augment, complement and lead the way in scientific discovery.
The SKA will be hosted in South Africa’s Karoo region, where the high and mid-frequency dishes will exist, and in Western Australia’s Murchison Shire, where the low-frequency antennas will reside. These remote locations were chosen for scientific and technical reasons, from the atmospherics above the sites to the radio quietness, which comes from being some of the most remote places on Earth.
The SKA Project will be a truly global effort, with about 20 countries involved in its design and development.
Photo Credits: SKA Observatory