“Square Kilometre Array: A Science Mega-Project in the Making, 1990-2012” by Richard T. Schilizzi, Ronald D. Ekers, Peter E. Dewdney, Philip Crosby

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Rating: 3/5 Stars.

A book about the SKA (Square Kilometre Array), an ambitious science project to build a radio telescope with the equivalent collecting area of a square kilometre. With Phase 1 of SKA still under construction, the book covers the initial idea for the telescope, the organisation that grew up to promote, support and construct it, the technology and engineering challenges it poses and the politics and lobbying behind the decision to site it at South Africa and Australia, and the main control centre in the UK.

Unlike other science projects that are proposed ‘top-down’ (by governments or science organisations), the SKA was started ‘bottom-up’ by a community of radio astronomers from around the world, who got together to discuss what the next big radio astronomy project would be. Thus grew the idea of the SKA, an array of radio telescopes that could gather enough information from radio signals to answer questions about cosmology (finding faint signals from the beginning of the universe), perform rapid sky surveys (due to its huge field of view) and observe transient events in space (by rapidly processing information).

The informal SKA organisation grew and changed to become an international organisation charged with designing, siting and constructing the SKA. Over time, the SKA was split into two phases, with Phase I being a smaller version of the SKA (now being built) and Phase II to be constructed later. The site of the SKA was also divided between South Africa and Australia, each with its constellation of radio telescopes to probe different parts of the radio spectrum.

This book covers the history of the SKA, from its beginnings to just before the present. Over several chapters, it covers the history of the organisation, the outreach efforts by the organisation to national governments and science organisations to get support and funding, the discussions about what kind of science the SKA would perform, the kinds of technology needed to build the telescopes and to gather and process the data, and the decision to where to site the SKA.

Depending on your interests, parts of the book may seem ‘dry’, but the book does offer a comprehensive overview of the history of the SKA, with many references and footnotes for those who want to know more information behind the decisions made by the SKA.

For now, the scientific world waits until the SKA is constructed to learn what new wonder and discoveries about the universe will be unveiled as it listens to the cosmos.

Book read from 2026/09/03 to 2026/09/11.