Current deployment of a partial LAMBDA station of SKA-Low antennas at the ATCA site. Image credit:CSIRO/Farmpix

SKA-Low will be a transformational low-frequency radio telescope, providing unprecedented capability to detect and study the Epoch of Reionisation, catalog radio emission from galaxies at all cosmic epochs, and answer questions that we do not yet know to pose. Although SKA-Low by itself will not provide the sub-arcsecond angular resolution required for maximising synergy with frontline optical/IR telescopes such as JWST, the planned tied-array mode does indirectly allow this capability by enabling participation in VLBI observations. Effectively linking SKA-Low to the global radio astronomy network requires additional collecting area distributed in patches separated by hundreds to thousands of km. CSIRO is undertaking a development project is called LAMBDA: the Low-frequency Australian Megametre-Baseline Demonstrator Array with a view to facilitating low-frequency VLBI in the southern hemisphere. The first step has been to build a partial SKA-Low station at the ATCA site, which will be followed by another partial SKA-Low station at Parkes, with a view to expanding these to full stations and adding additional sites across Australia. The image above shows the currently LAMBDA deployment at the ATCA site. (Image credit: CSIRO/Farmpix)