SKA Construction 2025-2027 (continuation)

Engineers at the University of Manchester are building the software brains for the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which spans two sites in South Africa and Australia. The SKA is not a single dish but an interferometer—a network of thousands of linked antennas that act as one giant eye on the sky. Manchester’s team is writing the code that will let the telescope hunt for pulsars and fast radio bursts, and they are developing the central monitoring and control system for the low-frequency part of the array. They are also advising on the synchronisation and timing systems that keep the whole network ticking in perfect unison. This matters because the SKA will see deeper into cosmic time than any previous instrument, potentially revealing the first stars and galaxies, testing Einstein’s theories under extreme conditions, and mapping the structure of the universe itself. This is fundamental science: the immediate payoff is knowledge, not a product. But past investments in radio astronomy gave us Wi-Fi and GPS, so the practical applications of this work, while unpredictable, are real.