Observatories: The Square Kilometre Array (SKA)

It's radio astronomy, so bigger receivers are better. That's also why the Atacama Large Millimetre/sub-millimetre Array ALMA is being built right now eta: next year.

SKA: 

• The SKA Organisation is a non-profit body.
• It has nine funding member countries, Australia, Canada, China, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and the UK, and India is an associate member.
• ETA: 2024, construction starts 2016.
• The HQ is being built in Manchester, UK. 
• Receivers are in South Africa, Australia & New Zealand so the center of the galaxy can be scanned.
• 70 MHz -30GHzrange
• 50 to 100x the resolution
• It will stretch across 5,000km and consist of 3,000 high frequency dishes, 40 million mid-frequency antennas and 2.5 million low-frequency antennas.
• 10,000x quicker scanning

There are three parts, 
1. SKA Low-array. Simple 70-200MHz dipole antennas 100m dia. groups of 90.
2. SKA Mid-array. 200-500MHz 'tiles' 3x3m into 60m dia.stations. that's those big tiles.
3. Dish array.  500MHz to 30GHz several thousand 15m receivers.

 Australia's role in the SKA project will involve searching for low-frequency radio waves using 3000 smaller antennas which stand less than a metre tall.

Links:

skatelescope.org

SKA Africa

Australia and New Zealand SKA project (anzSKA)

CSIRO & SKA

SKA.edu.au

 'squarekilometrearray' on Flickr

Square Kilometre Array (SKA) on Facebook