Editorial

SKAO Director-General Prof. Philip Diamond

Dear friends and colleagues,

This 13th issue of Contact is bursting at the seams with news of science results, meetings, construction activities on both telescope sites, progress towards getting new members of the SKA Observatory, and with interesting articles on outreach, along with a profile of our Japanese colleague Dr Takuya Akahori.

It is great to see this acceleration in progress across the global SKAO partnership and community. I feel a palpable sense of excitement when I speak to colleagues both within and without the Observatory. This was captured for me, personally, when I attended the SKAO-ngVLA meeting in Vancouver. First, it was good to meet face-to-face with many colleagues whom I had not seen for several years, for reasons we all know. Secondly, as the article on the meeting mentions, there was a vibrancy in the room, with many of the speakers (most of whom seemed impossibly young!) showing great new results and highlighting what they felt would be some of the great capabilities that would become available in the relatively near future.

We’re seeing this anticipation and excitement being fulfilled as we receive photographs and hear status reports on the construction activities on the two sites. As I write this, we now have contractors deployed in both the Karoo and the Murchison and the long-awaited deployment of SKA infrastructure has begun.

I hope you enjoy reading Contact. I should mention that Cassandra (Managing Editor) and Joe (Design) both recently received SKAO Recognition Awards for Excellence for the work they do on the magazine. These awards are nominated by colleagues and selected by a panel of peers.

PROF. PHILIP DIAMOND, SKAO DIRECTOR-GENERAL