New HQ Building of Future Giant Radio Telescope SKA Inaugurated

Less than a year after the decision to site the revolutionary Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in both Southern Africa and Australia, the SKA Organisation announced that it has opened its new international headquarters building which was constructed in just 6 months.

The opening ceremony for the building which will be home to the team managing the construction, design and scientific output of this groundbreaking telescope was observed by an invited audience of local and global dignitaries, scientists and engineers.

The SKA Organisation headquarters, located near to, and with views of the iconic Lovell Telescope at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK, will be the central control hub for a global team who, over the next decade, will be building the SKA -- the largest radio telescope ever seen on Earth.

The elegant and modern building, funded by the University of Manchester, is a state of the art facility with energy-efficiency technologies is planned to eventually be the work place of about 60 members of staff, including visiting scientists and engineers.

The Square Kilometre Array is a radio telescope that is planned to be built from 2016 on and until 2024 in the remote and radio quiet deserts of Australia and Southern Africa. These seemingly harsh locations have been carefully chosen for their remoteness from any possible man made radio interference. The SKA will comprise thousands of radio telescopes, which will be located in these two desert locations, and will also have dishes and antennas spread over thousands of kilometers to create a single giant telescope.

When the faint radio waves, coming from the very edges of our universe reach the array of radio telescopes, the signals are then combined, using powerful supercomputers which will create a virtual telescope with a total collecting area of one square kilometer. This will make the SKA more than 50 times more sensitive than any existing radio telescope on Earth, surpassing even the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The SKA telescope will be attempting to unravel the most profound mysteries of humanity and will revolutionize our understanding of the universe. It will investigate how the first stars and galaxies formed after the big bang, how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and will even search for life beyond Earth. And scientists believe that the SKA's unparalleled sensitivity and ability to image such huge portions of the sky at up to 10,000 times to the speed of current survey telescopes will produce detailed information and provide answers to many more fundamental questions about mysteries which are baffling scientists today.

The project is led by the SKA Organisation, a not-for-profit company, which includes multiple countries around the world including Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and the UK. With India also as an associate member, the SKA Organisation is expected to embrace more countries over the coming years. With such a formidable scale, international collaboration is fundamental to this gigantic 21st Century project.

Construction of the SKA is due to begin in 2016 using a phased development approach. This means that scientific output will come even before the project completes and is fully operational in 2024, by which time several thousand combined radio telescopes will be collecting and processing data equivalent to 100 times today's global internet traffic.

However, even before the SKA comes online, a series of demonstrator telescopes and systems known as pathfinders and precursors, are already operational or under development across the world, paving the way for the kinds of technology which the SKA will need to pioneer to make the huge data available to scientists. These pathfinder and precursor telescopes, in place in Australia, South Africa, across Europe and in America are providing the SKA scientists with vital information relating to the science and technology that will be created and required to make the SKA work at its optimal performance capability.

With so much being learnt from the pathfinders and precursor telescopes, the SKA project is now entering a hugely exciting phase. Research organizations around the world along with leading industrial partners have recently being invited to collaborate and submit proposals on the R&D and design of the telescopes and instrumentation which will become the heart of this epic endeavor.

"We are now firmly on the journey to create one of the most iconic scientific instruments of the 21st century!," said Phil Diamond.