"The sun never sets on the SKA"
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17 October 2014
In what has been called “the largest ever gathering of people working on the international SKA project”, some 300 engineers and scientists recently gathered in Fremantle, WA, to progress the development of the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope and make the project a reality.
For CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, the week was a good opportunity to progress the development of the SKA, via our role in seven of the 11 SKA R&D consortia. Due to the range of international involvement in the project, and the need to work across timezones, during the week Director General of the SKA Professor Phil Diamond noted, “the sun never sets on the SKA.”
A major special event during the week was the inauguration of Shared Sky, an international exhibition bringing together art created by Indigenous Australian and South African artists from the two SKA telescope sites. A collaboration celebrating humanity’s ancient cultural wisdom, the exhibition reflects the spirit of the international science and engineering collaboration that is the SKA project, bringing together people from around the world to study the same sky.
The exhibition is open to the public until 2 November at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth.
To cap off the week, a small number of visitors were given an unique opportunity to visit CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, home to SKA precursors ASKAP and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), and also the site of Australian infrastructure for the SKA.
As part of the site visit, the attendees were treated to tours of the ASKAP antennas and the MRO Control Building, as well as a visit to the core of the MWA and a sneak-peak at the SKA pre-construction LFAA (low-frequency aperture array) Consortium test antenna array attached to the MWA as part of SKA pre-construction activities.
The long bus ride to site (about 350km from Geraldton) emphasised the remote nature of the Observatory and the importance of being ‘radio quiet’, leaving the visitors impressed with the progress of the telescopes and infrastructure already in place, preparing Australia for the future SKA telescope.
A selection of photos from the visit are available below (click on thumbnails for more detail). For more photos of the SKA Engineering Meeting, Shared Sky launch and MRO visit, please see the latest SKA Office's Monthly Report, for September 2014.
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