Green light on 1 July 2021 for the construction of the largest network of radio telescopes in the world, the Ska Observatory (Square Kilometer Array) (
The Ska observatory, a revolution for astronomy is born
), of which Italy is part of the Council with the 'National Institute of Astrophysics (Inaf).
The announcement was made by the Director General of the Ska Observatory (Skao), Phil Diamond, on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (Eas).
The construction phase will end in 2030 and the Observatory will be operational for more than 50 years. At the end of the work it will count thousands of dishes, distributed between Australia and South Africa, which will work in unison, like a single gigantic antenna. For Diamond, "humanity today is taking another giant step by committing to building what will be the largest scientific facility on the planet."
According to the president of INAF, Marco Tavani, "the Italian scientific community, represented by INAF, is ready to seize every opportunity offered by this exciting challenge to reveal the secrets of the universe". The total cost of the mega scientific infrastructure is 2 billion euros. With his parables Ska will be able to probe the cosmos to study phenomena on which it is difficult to collect data today, such as fast radio flashes. It will also make it possible to map millions of galaxies, to subject the theory of relativity to new tests and even to search for signs of extraterrestrial life.
The Ska Observatory, in charge of carrying out the project, was established in March 2019 with an international treaty signed in Rome by seven countries under the leadership of Italy. Based in the United Kingdom (
Ska radio telescope headquarters inaugurated
) and two sites in Australia and South Africa, Skao is the second largest intergovernmental organization in the world dedicated to astronomy, after the Southern European Observatory (ESO).
More than 1,000 scientists and engineers from 40 countries are involved in the design and development of SKA telescopes. The site in South Africa will include, in particular, 197 dishes of 15 meters in diameter, located in the Karoo region, including the 64 MeerKAT antennas already installed and managed by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (Sarao). In Western Australia, on the other hand, 131,072 antennas 2 meters high will be installed at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (Csiro).
