Canada has committed C$269 million (R3.7 billion) over eight years to support the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, a collaborative effort between South Africa and Australia.
The National Research Council of Canada’s (NRC) Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre will oversee this investment and work with Canadian industrial partners to deliver key observatory systems. The NRC will represent Canada in the SKAO Council.
“Canada has been a long-standing leader in astronomy and the exploration of the universe, and Canada’s membership in the Square Kilometre Array Observatory will give Canadian researchers access to the world’s most powerful radio-telescope,” said François-Phillipe Champagne, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry.
“Beyond astronomical discovery, SKAO-related technologies have the potential to enhance the everyday life of Canadians, through better networks, and in other areas like more accurate and advanced driver assistance systems in cars.”
It was also announced that Canada’s MDA Space has been awarded the SKAO construction contract to develop and integrate the correlator and beamformer for the SKA-Mid telescope in South Africa, which acts as the “brain” of the array, combining the signals received by its 197 antennas.
The correlator and beamformer is an extremely complex component that’s central to the telescope’s key functionalities. SKA-Mid’s 197 dishes create a large number of different ‘baselines’ between individual dishes in the array. The correlator has to align and process the signals from each pair of dishes to allow the creation of images and other science products from the telescope. The system built by the NRC and MDA Space uses state-of-the-art field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) which carry out mathematical calculations extremely quickly, but require highly specialised programming.
The announcements follow more than two decades of Canadian contributions to the SKA project dating back to its inception. Since then, the SKAO has consistently ranked as a top priority by the Canadian astronomical community, and was highlighted as such in the Canadian Astronomical Society’s Long Range Plan, a decadal review most recently updated in 2020.
“Canada has been a valued partner within the SKA project for over 20 years, and I am delighted to welcome them as our newest Member, extending the Observatory’s membership into North America,” said SKAO Director-General Prof. Phil Diamond.
“Just over a year ago at the SKA-ngVLA meeting in Vancouver, I saw first hand the enthusiasm among astronomers in Canada, particularly early career researchers who will be using the SKA telescopes. Now we can look forward to further deepening the ties between our colleagues there and the broader SKAO community as we progress through construction and into operations in the coming years.”
During the pre-construction phase, Canada contributed to four of the SKA design consortia. NRC led the Central Signal Processor consortium and, working with industry partner MDA Space, designed the correlator and beamformer which forms the basis of the contract now being announced. Canadian institutions made further contributions to the Science Data Processor, Dish and Telescope Manager consortia.
Astronomers at Canadian institutions are involved in 12 of the 14 SKAO Science Working Groups, including currently co-chairing the Magnetism group, highlighting the community’s interest in a broad range of SKAO science areas. Canada also hosts the innovative SKA pathfinder telescope CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, which alongside its core mission has proved to be a prolific hunter of fast radio bursts, a burgeoning area in astronomy research which the SKA telescopes will build upon. The CHIME team has been recognised for its role in training students and early career researchers, and giving opportunities to underrepresented groups.
Canada is also heavily involved with the SKA Regional Centre Network (SRCNet), an international effort to design, develop and operate a distributed network of high-performance computing centres to support the science exploitation of the SKA data. Canada’s SRC will be established through investment and expansion of existing infrastructure, which will also benefit other Canadian projects and services.
