S K ASOK ACOO RCNOERRN E R
The SKAO grows: Canada, India and Germany bring membership to 12 BY JOSHUA RODDEN AND ANNE DANIELS (SKAO)
The SKAO has grown from nine to an impressive 12 members in 2024, welcoming Canada, India and Germany within the past five months. In June, Canada became the first SKAO member state in the Americas. Making the announcement, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Phillipe Champagne also confirmed a $269m (approximately €182m) investment over eight years, to be overseen by the National Research Council of Canada’s (NRC) Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre. Canada’s MDA Space, a longtime industry partner of NRC, has been awarded the SKAO construction contract to develop and integrate the correlator and beamformer for the SKA-Mid telescope – the system that acts as the “brain” of the array, combining signals from all 197 of its dishes. India’s longstanding involvement in the SKA project also culminated in SKAO membership in July. Its radio astronomy community, led by the late Prof. Govind Swarup, proposed one of the first concepts for a large radio observatory of the class of the SKAO in the 1990s.
Above: The Indian, German and Canadian flags waving amongst the other member states’ flags at the SKAO Global Headquarters in the UK.
SKA telescopes, and it will lead the development of the Observatory’s management and control system. Indian membership was marked at a celebratory event in Pune with senior government officials in November. Good news comes in threes, and so it did for SKAO membership, with Germany joining the Observatory in November. German contributions to the SKAO already include significant investment from the Max Planck Society in the ongoing MeerKAT telescope extension (MeerKAT+), which will ultimately be integrated into the SKA-Mid telescope in the coming years. German involvement has also included the construction of an SKA-Mid prototype, known as SKAMPI, which saw its first light earlier this year. The prototype dish has enabled radio frequency interference testing on site but is also helping the team prepare for commissioning of the first SKA-Mid dishes.
India has since made significant contributions to the critical software elements that sit at the heart of the
EU ambassadors visit SKA-Mid site In April, the SKAO and its South African partners hosted a major diplomatic visit at the SKA-Mid telescope site in the Karoo, with ambassadors and high commissioners from 17 European countries, the European Union and Australia in attendance. “I was delighted to experience first-hand the extraordinary and far-reaching work being done at the SKAO. It underscores the strength of the strategic partnership of South Africa and the European Union on science and innovation and how through multilateralism and international cooperation we can address the defining challenges of our time,” said EU Ambassador to South Africa Sandra Kramer.
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