London, May 26 (Xinhua-ANI): The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope, which is to be constructed as the world's biggest and most sensitive radio telescope, will be shared by South Africa and Australia/New Zealand, said the SKA Organization on Friday.
The SKA Organization, which is based at University of Manchester in Britain, said in a statement that after a conference in the Netherlands, it has agreed on a dual site solution for the SKA telescope. The two bidders were South Africa, and a combination of Australia and New Zealand.
The SKA telescope is an international project with a target construction cost of 1.5 billion euros (1.9 billion U.S. dollars) and construction of Phase I of the SKA is scheduled to start in 2016. Members of the SKA Organization include Australia, Canada, China, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, and Britain, with India as an associate member.
The telescope is actually a combination of thousands of dishes and antennas, whose total collecting area will be approximately one square kilometer, giving 50 times the sensitivity and 10,000 times the survey speed of the best current-day telescopes.t will address unanswered fundamental questions about our universe, including how the first stars and galaxies formed after the big bang, how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and the search for life beyond the earth.
"Today we are a stage closer to achieving our goal of building the SKA. This position was reached after very careful consideration of information gathered from extensive investigations at both candidate sites," said Professor John Womersley, chairman of the SKA Board of Directors.
According to the agreement, the majority of SKA dishes in Phase I will be built in South Africa, and further dishes will be added to some existing facilities in Australia.
All the dishes and the mid-frequency aperture arrays for Phase II of the SKA will be built in Southern Africa (also including some other African countries), while the low-frequency aperture array antennas for Phase I and Phase II will be built in Australia/New Zealand. (Xinhua-ANI)
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