Name of the Project
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project.

Location
Africa and Australia.

Client
The international SKA project is run by the UK-based SKA Organisation, which currently comprises ten countries – Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and the UK. India is an associate member and is expected to become a full member shortly.

The SKA Organisation formalises relationships between the international partners and centralises the leadership project.

The project in South Africa is the responsibility of a separate, local organisation, SKA SA.

Project Description
The SKA will provide one-million square metres of collecting area, which demands a revolutionary break from traditional radio-telescope design.

The project will use three types of antennas (radio-wave receptors) – dishes, midfrequency aperture arrays and low-frequency aperture arrays – to provide continuous frequency coverage from 70 MHz to 10 GHz. Combining the signals from the antennas will create a telescope with a collecting area equivalent to a dish with an area of about 1 km2.

The first phase of the SKA, known as SKA1, will result in the creation of two complementary instruments, one each in South Africa and Australia.

The South African instrument will comprise about 200 dishes, will operate in the 350 MHz to 14 GHz frequency range and is known as SKA1–Mid. The Australian instrument will comprise more than 100 000 (perhaps as many as 130 000) dipole antennas, will operate in the 50 MHz to 350 MHz frequency range and is called SKA1–Low.

SKA1–Mid will include the 64 dishes of the South African precursor to the SKA, the MeerKAT radio telescope array, being built in the Karoo region. Australia’s precursor, the Australian SKA Pathfinder (better known as Askap and already in operation) will serve as surveying instrument for the SKA.

The central regions, in Australia and in South Africa, will contain cores, each 5 km in diameter – one for each antenna type. Fifty per cent of the collecting area will be within the central cores. The aperture array antennas will extend to about 200 km from the core regions. In Africa, the dishes will be positioned at distant stations that are 3 000 km from the core regions.

The construction of the SKA will be phased.

Phase 1 (SKA1) will comprise about 10% of the array and will include dishes and low-frequency aperture arrays.

The Australian SKA Pathfinder and South Africa’s Meerkat precursor dishes will be incorporated in the SKA1. The Murchison Widefield Array, located at the Australia site, is another precursor telescope to the SKA.

Phase 2 (SKA2) will extend the array with midfrequency aperture arrays and further dishes.

All the dishes for SKA2 will be located in Africa.

All the low-frequency aperture arrays will be located in Australia.

All the midfrequency aperture arrays will be built in Southern Africa.

The phased construction of the telescope will mean that the SKA can start operating before construction is completed.

Potential Job Creation
Not stated.

Value
SKA1 is expected to cost €650-million (about R8.9-billion).

Duration
The first elements of SKA1 should be deployed in 2016 and construction of SKA1 should start in 2018 and be completed in 2023.

Latest Developments
The South African component of the SKA radio telescope programme has become a major "headache" for the South African aviation sector, Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS) executive manager Jeoffrey Matshoba has noted in a presentation to the Commercial Aviation Association of Southern Africa Commercial Aviation Symposium. "We did not realise the impact it would have on aviation.”

The Cape Town–Johannesburg air route is the twelfth busiest air route in the world, he highlighted. Further, all the domestic Gauteng–Cape Town air routes overfly the SKA reservation in the Karoo region in the Northern Cape.

It is a requirement of the SKA that no air routes pass over its sites. Consequently, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) is adamant that the ATNS move these air traffic routes.

"We have to redesign those routes," he has stated. They will all have to be shifted eastwards to pass the SKA reservation.

However, moving the air routes will increase the distance that airliners must fly. This will increase their fuel consumption and, subsequently their costs. These increased costs will come to just over R2-million a year, Matshoba has indicated.

The aviation industry, he avers, has to convince the DST that there is a technical solution to the problem, which will allow for the SKA and aviation to co-exist.

Key Contracts and Suppliers
South Africa: Neotel/Broadband Infraco joint venture, or JV (bandwidth network); Eskom (electricity); Telkom (telecommunications); and Nokia Siemens Networks, Intel, Seacom, Dimension Data, Microsoft and IBM (connectivity support).

On Budget and on Time?
The project is reportedly on course.

Contact Details for Project Information
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research general and technical enquiries, Tendani Tsedu, tel +27 12 841 3417.
SKA South Africa, tel +27 11 442 2434, fax +27 11 442 2454 or email tcheetham@ska.ac.za.
SKA Organisation chief communication officer William Garnier, tel +44 161 306 9613 or email w.garnier@skatelescope.org.