New Zealand joins Australia to bid for the SKA!
An amazing announcement was made on 21 August in Sydney. The New Zealand government on that day signed a memorandum of understanding with Australia agreeing to join Australia’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array or SKA. The SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope and a mega-science project costing some 1.5 billion euros over the next decade or so. Nineteen countries are at present members of the SKA consortium, and the expectation (or hope) is that all these will contribute to the huge costs involved. This will easily be the biggest science project ever undertaken in either country, and one of the largest in the world in the early 21st century. It is a project of extraordinary technological challenges, but also fantastic scientific goals of exploring the earliest moments soon after the creation of the universe using an instrument some 100 times more sensitive than any yet built.