Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO): Daily Current Affairs
- Recently, the Square Kilometer Array observatory council held its first meeting.
- In this meeting approval for the establishment of the world’s largest radio telescope was given.
- SKAO is a new intergovernmental organisation dedicated to radio astronomy.
- The organizations’ headquarter is in the UK. At present, organizations’ from ten countries are a part of the SKAO.
- These countries include Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK.
- For many years the square kilometer array has been a dream for the radio astronomer.
- But now it is going to become a reality with the aim to build the world’s largest radio observatory.
- It is a truly mega science project of the 21st century.
- The creation of SKAO follows a decade of detailed engineering design work supported by more than 500 engineers, over 1,000 scientists and dozens of policy-makers in more than 20 countries.
- The completion is expected to take nearly ten years at a cost of over £1.8 billion.
- Radio telescopes are capable of detecting invisible gas; hence they can reveal areas of space that may be hidden by cosmic dust.
- Significantly, since the first radio signals were detected by physicist Karl Jansky in the 1930s, astronomers have used radio telescopes to detect radio waves emitted by different objects in the universe and explore it.
- According to NASA, the field of radio astronomy evolved after World War II and became one of the most important tools for making astronomical observations.
- IN 2020, The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed. It was the world’s second largest single dish radio telescope. It was built in 1963.
- The SKAO will be arrays of antennas situated in two continents — Africa and Australia.
- Once built, it will be of great help to the scientific community.
- They will be able to use SKAO to look into some of the unexplored areas of the universe and seek answers about its history and evolution, study fundamental physics in extreme environments and know about galaxies over cosmic time.
- The telescope will incorporate a mix of parabolic antennas, or “dishes”, as well as dipole antennas, which look a little like traditional TV aerials.
- The aim is to construct an effective collecting area measuring hundreds of thousands of square meters.
- The system will operate across a frequency range from roughly 50 megahertz to, ultimately, 25 gigahertz. In wavelength terms, this is in the centimeters to meters range.
- The SKA will be so powerful that it would be able to detect airport radar on a planet tens of lights years away, according to the SKAO.
- India has made significant contributions in the design phase and is looking to be an active member of the construction phase as well, with involvement in four work packages covering different aspects of telescope hardware and software elements.
- India will be leading and delivering the Telescope Manager system, nicknamed the ‘nervous system’ of the SKAO.