Jodrell Bank named as giant radio telescope HQ

The telescope will be made up of hundreds of dishes and thousands of antennae

Jodrell Bank is to be the headquarters for the world’s biggest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). 

The SKA will receive radio waves from objects further away than ever before and aims to “answer fundamental questions about the origins and nature of the universe”. The project is set to be one of the largest ever conceived, with construction planned to start in 2018 and end in 2025.

The telescope will be made up of hundreds of dishes and thousands of antennae that will be located in South Africa and Australia. When combined, the instruments will have the equivalent collecting area of a dish one million square metres wide – 1km² – and be so sensitive that they can detect an airport radar
on a planet 50 light years away. 

The SKA Organisation has been working temporarily from Jodrell Bank, near Manchester, during the pre-construction phase and the site will be expanded to support the project.  

The project presents massive engineering challenges, from meeting the power and communications requirements of installing the antennae and dishes over such a large area, to the supercomputers needed to process the 100 terabytes of data that the SKA will collect per second.

The baseline design has been devised and is being developed. Initial cost estimates for the first phase are around €1.5 billion.