Science Media Centre

In a guest post for the Australian science site The Conversation,  Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, Dean of Engineering at University of Johannesburg, discusses the scientific, financial and political implications of hosting the Square Kilometre Array – at least in part. It was announced on Friday that the radio telescope project would be split between competing South [...]

After many months of waiting, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation has finally announced that the massive telescope array will be shared between Australia-NZ and South Africa. The SKA Organisation made the announcement late on Friday at a meeting in Amsterdam. See the announcement here. More information and images are available on the Australian SKA [...]

Political lobbying may claw back some chance for New Zealand to participate in the $US2 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the  world’s biggest telescope array. New Zealand joined Australia in a joint proposal for a trans-Tasman SKA with 3000 radio telescopes — many of them in the Western Australia desert and one or two in [...]

Lisa Harvey-Smith, a scientist working for the CSIRO in Australia, writes about the impending decision on the Square Kilometre Array for the science website The Conversation. (reproduced here under Creative Commons licence). Australia’s bid for the Square Kilometre Array – an insider’s perspective Australia and New Zealand could be on the brink of a major [...]

Kiran Chug of the Dominion Post reports on the joint NZ-Australia bid to be a part of the ‘world’s biggest science project’. The bid, in competition with South Africa, is for the Square Kilometer Array – a giant set of telescopes which would be used to gather data about the universe.  A conference is being [...]

An opinion piece by science writer Marilyn Head, looking at the joint Australian-New Zealand bid for the Square Kilometre Array project. An excerpt: (read in full here) “Despite Australia’s acknowledged global leadership in radio astronomy and superb cutting-edge designs for both the low and high frequency parts of the array, the ultimate decision will depend [...]

It’ll be one of the biggest scientific projects since the Large Hadron Collider was constructed beneath the Franco-Swiss border and could massively advance what we know about the universe and how it was formed. And a global competition to host the Square Kilometre Array project also means New Zealand may get to play a significant [...]

Media coverage of the radio telescope launch NBR: Clark, Cunliffe, Hodgson MIA as AUT cuts ribbon on $4b megascience bid NBR: In pictures – the AUT radio telescope goes live New Zealand Herald: NZ bids for starring role in cosmic search Computerworld:Radio telescope project sees the light TVNZ: AUT probes secrets of space For more [...]