SKA preconstruction stage 1

Engineers are now designing the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), piece by piece before construction begins. This matters because current radio telescopes cannot see faint, distant signals from the early universe or map the sky quickly enough to answer fundamental questions about how galaxies formed and how dark energy drives cosmic expansion. The SKA will be far more sensitive and faster than any existing telescope, but building it requires solving unprecedented engineering challenges. This grant funds the preconstruction work: defining system requirements and designing three critical subsystems—the low-frequency Aperture Arrays (the telescope’s antennas), the Central Signal Processing system, and the Science Data Processor, the software that will handle the torrent of data the telescope produces. If the design succeeds, the SKA will transform astronomy. It will produce radio images with ten times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope and survey the sky thousands of times faster than current instruments. This is primarily curiosity-driven fundamental science—there is no immediate practical application. But past fundamental radio astronomy research gave us Wi-Fi, GPS, and medical imaging. A deeper understanding of the cosmos, enabled by the SKA, could similarly seed unexpected technologies decades from now.