South Africa's MeerKAT.
The giant telescope, which will comprise thousands of antennas in both Australia and Africa, with the core in South Africa, will be the largest scientific experiment in the world, and will be looking to answer some of mankind's most enigmatic questions: is there other life in the universe, how do galaxies form and what is dark matter?
Directors of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation met in late July at the headquarters at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom. At the moment the organisation is trying to iron out design details of the telescope – since it was decided in May last year that it would be split – and divide the design workload for phase one between different consortia.
In phase one, Australia and South Africa's precursor telescopes, Askap and MeerKAT respectively, will be incorporated into what will become the SKA. As part of the bid to host the giant telescope, both countries developed pre-cursor telescopes. The first dish of the 64-dish MeerKAT telescope will be constructed at the end of this year. It is expected to come online in 2016.
However, the panel tasked with evaluating consortia's proposals "expressed some concerns about potential fragmentation of manpower with consortia". The consortia can include groups of research institutions and companies from countries on different continents.
Consequently, "the board approved the proposed negotiation process in which a schedule of deliverables will be completed for each work package and value assigned to them", the SKA Organisation said on Friday.
"The SKA board has instructed the SKA office to proceed with the design phase for SKA Phase 1 assuming a capital expenditure cost ceiling for construction of €650-million. The evolution of the SKA Phase 1 project to fit within this cost ceiling will be guided both during the design phase and construction by scientific and engineering assessments of the baseline design undertaken by the SKA office," it said.
The next board meeting would be held at the end of October in Qatar, and it is expected that the draft hosting agreements – the details of what both South Africa and Australia agree to as hosts, and the support that the SKA Organisation will give the hosts – will be presented at that meeting.
Sarah Wild is the author of Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa's Quest to Hear the Songs of the Stars, published by Jacana Media in 2012.