Steven Gregory Rawlings (11 October 1961 – 11 January 2012) was an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, where he held a Professorship in Astrophysics and a Fellowship at St Peter's College. He studied Physics and Theoretical Physics at St John's College, Cambridge and received his PhD in Radio Astronomy in 1988. He was one of the lead scientists in the Square Kilometre Array project
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Square Kilometre Array
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Square Kilometre Array (SKA)
An artist's impression of the central core of dish antennas of the SKA
Location
Australia / New Zealand / South Africa
Built
Phase 1 2019
Phase 2 2024
Phase 3 2022 onwards
First light
2020 (planned)
Telescope style
Phased array
Collecting area
1,000,000 m²
Website
skatelescope.org
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a radio telescope in development in Australia and South Africa which will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre.[1] It will operate over a wide range of frequencies and its size will make it 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument. It will require very high performance central computing engines and long-haul links with a capacity greater than the current global Internet traffic.[2] It will be able to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than ever before.
With receiving stations extending out to distance of at least 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) from a concentrated central core, it will continue radio astronomy's tradition of providing the highest resolution images in all astronomy. The SKA will be built in the southern hemisphere, in Sub-Saharan states with cores in South Africa and Australia, where the view of the Milky Way Galaxy, is best and radio interference least.[3]
With a budget of €1.5 billion, construction of the SKA is scheduled to begin in 2016 for initial observations by 2019 and full operation by 2024.[4][5] The headquarters of the project are in Manchester, in the UK.
