SKAO
Square Kilometre Array Observatory
The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) is a large, distributed and highly innovative radio observatory that will allow astronomers to probe the early phases of the Universe, and to gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental laws of physics. It will be the most powerful radio telescope ever built, spanning three continents, and will begin operation in 2028.
Infrastructure and User Services
The Square Kilometre Array Obervatory (SKAO), currently under construction in Australia and South Africa, will be the world’s most powerful radio telescope. The project will be realised in phases. SKAO is an international governmental organisation (IGO), of which the Netherlands is a founding signatory, and as of 2025 there are ten formal international members and several pending member states.
SKAO1 will comprise two telescopes in two locations, together with a distributed science and operations network and a headquarters that will co-ordinate development, construction and operations. SKAO1_low in Australia will consist of 130,000 antennas, distributed over 500 stations. Signals from the antennas in each station will be combined to form one or more ‘beams’ on the sky. The operating frequency will be between 50 MHz and 350 MHz. SKAO1_mid will be located in South Africa and consist of 197 dishes (incorporating the 64 dishes of the MeerKAT Precursor). An initial suite of receivers will cover the 350 MHz – 25 GHz parts of the spectrum.
Signals from the telescopes and stations will be transported to a central processing facility on-site in each country, with a dedicated high bandwidth connection to initial science processing and archiving centres in Perth (AU) and Cape Town (SA). Further processing by science teams will take place in a federated and globally distributed network of SKAO Regional Centre Network (SRCNet) capable of handling the massive data streams coming from SKAO. ASTRON is leading the way in defining the scope and function of these SKAO SDCs. In part this initiative is motivated by the immediate needs to deal with the data from ASTRON's own telescopes, LOFAR and WSRT, but data from these facilities will also be a vital resource in preparing for the SKAO.
Examples/description of the type of research
The SKAO Science case is broad and contains a number of key projects in which radio astronomy can make a unique contribution to our understanding of the Universe. The following large projects play a major role informing the design of SKAO1:
- Probing the Dark Ages: Cosmic dawn and the Epoch of Reionisation.
- Challenging Einstein: Detecting gravitational waves, understanding their origin and testing theories of gravity using pulsars
- Cosmic Magnetism: To understand the origin of magnetic fields
- Cradle of Life: How do you make planets? Are we alone in the Universe?
- Galaxy Evolution: Tracing atomic hydrogen using ~10 million galaxies, unraveling the life-cycle of a galaxy.
- The Bursting Sky: what is the source of the bursts of radio waves.
- Forming Stars Through Cosmic Time: how were the first stars formed.
- Cosmology and Dark Energy: understanding the nature of dark energy.
How to access the infrastructure?
All access for researchers to their data will be via the distributed SKA Regional Centre Network (SRCNet) which will be a distributed network of virtual access points, with user support, data storage and processing capability, to access and analyse their data sets.