ASKAP wins CSIRO's highest honour

28 October 2015

The team behind CSIRO’s newest radio telescope, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), has won the 2015 Chairman’s Medal at today’s CSIRO Awards ceremony.

The Chairman’s Medal is CSIRO’s highest honour and recognises exceptional research teams that have made significant scientific or technological advances of national, international and/or commercial importance. The citation for the 2015 award reads,

“For revolutionising astronomy by developing a spectacular new capability for observing wide areas of the sky using the world’s first widefield imaging receivers for radio astronomy on the antennas of the ASKAP radio telescope.”

While eleven of the fourteen ‘seminal contributors’ to the project attended the awards ceremony in Canberra, the fourteenth member, the entire ASKAP team, celebrated together despite being spread across the different sites of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science – in Sydney, Perth, Geraldton, the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, Narrabri, and Parkes.

“This Chairman's Medal is awarded in recognition of the whole ASKAP team, and the vision, expertise and dedication that is essential to its success,” said CASS Director Lewis Ball, “Which is to say, this achievement would not have been possible without every member of the team who has directly contributed over the years to developing and implementing PAFs.”

“Together we’ve built a fantastic radio telescope, the best in the world at what it does and one that’s unlikely to be superseded for generations. Thank you. We could not have done it without you.”

This award follows the success the team saw at the 2013 Engineers Australia Engineering Excellence Awards and The Australian Innovation Awards in 2014 – find out more about our award winning telescope in the latest animation from CSIRO.

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