Industrial overview
As the SKA project moves through the design, development, construction and operational stages, industry will play a crucial role in the delivery and through-life support of the technologies and infrastructures. The scale of the SKA, as well as the need to mass-produce components, requires industry engagement on a scale unprecedented in radio astronomy. The SKA expects to collaborate with a variety of industry partners, including niche R&D companies, followed by increasing engagement through commercial contracts with high-volume manufacturers, technology systems vendors, site services and installation firms, as well as power and data transmission specialists.
SKA domains with potential for industry engagement are the following:
- Site studies and infrastructure engineering.
- Scheduling, operations and maintenance models.
- Low-cost, mass manufacturing of small to medium diameter dishes.
- Wide bandwidth feed antennas for dishes.
- Broadband, active, phased arrays for aperture and focal plane applications.
- Low-noise, highly integrated, receivers for both cryogenic and uncooled applications.
- High‐speed (terabits/s) digital fibre optic links for distance regimes extending from 100 m to <3 000 km.
- Low-cost, high‐speed (GS/s) analogue to digital converters.
- High-speed digital signal processing engines (petabyte/s) and ultra-fast super computing (at exaflop rates).
- Power supply.
The SKA will drive technology development, particularly in information and communication technology. Spin-off innovations in this area will benefit other systems that process large volumes of data from geographically dispersed sources. The energy requirements of the SKA also provide an opportunity to accelerate technology development in scalable renewable energy generation, distribution, storage and demand reduction.
Pivotal SKA technology is being demonstrated with a suite of precursor and pathfinder telescopes as well as with design studies by SKA groups around the world. Key SKA technologies will be determined from these and many solutions will be selected and integrated into the final instrument.
| SKA Pre-cursors | |
| ASKAP (Australia) | Phased Array Feed (PAF) to trial wide-field-of-view high-dynamic technologies |
| MeerKAT (South Africa) | Array of 60 13.5 m offset-fed dishes with single pixel wideband feeds |
| SKA Pathfinders | |
| LOFAR (Netherlands) | Low-frequency aperture array telescope based on antenna tiles |
| ATA (USA) | 42-element array to test coupling effects between shrouded offset Gregorian antennas |
| APERITIF (Netherland) | Phased Array Feed system (PAF) of dual polarized antenna arrays |
| e-MERLIN (UK) | cm-wavelength array spanning 217 km (first full-time array to be connected at 10 Gb/sec) |
| e-EVN (Europe) | Interferometry network of radio telescope from Europe to China to Puerto Rico and South Africa |
| EVLA (USA) | 27-element array of 25 m diameter dishes located in New Mexico |
| LWA (USA) | ~53 stations of ~256 dipole pairs spread over ~100 m diameter area |
| SKA Molonglo Prototype (Australia) | To provide low frequency spectroscopy and polarisation capability |
| Arecibo (USA) | Development of phased array feeds and testing of data management and cyber infrastructure |
