Founding members sign SKA Observatory treaty
By Ye Qi
People's Daily app
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Rome (People's Daily) - Countries involved in the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Project came together in Rome Tuesday for the signing of the international treaty establishing the intergovernmental organization that will oversee the creation of the world's largest radio telescope. 

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(Photo: Han Shuo/People's Daily)

Seven countries signed the treaty— Australia, China, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the United Kingdom. India and Sweden, who also took part in the multilateral negotiations to set up the SKA Observatory IGO, will now have one year to sign the treaty. Together, these nine countries will form the founding members of the new organization.

Representatives from Canada, France, Japan, Korea, Malta, New Zealand, Spain and Switzerland were also in attendance to witness the signature and reaffirmed their strong interest in the project. They all confirmed they are making their best efforts to prepare for a decision on future participation of their respective countries in the SKA Observatory.

Ministers, ambassadors and other high-level representatives from the seven countries gathered in the Italian capital for the signature of the so-called Rome Convention, which establishes the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO), the intergovernmental organization tasked with delivering and operating the SKA.

Catherine Cesarsky, chair of the SKA board of directors, said, "Rome wasn't built in a day. Likewise, designing, building and operating the world's biggest telescope takes decades of efforts, expertise, innovation, perseverance, and global collaboration. Today we've laid the foundations that will enable us to make the SKA a reality."

The SKA will be the largest science facility on the planet, with infrastructure spread across three continents on both hemispheres. Its two networks of hundreds of dishes and thousands of antennas will be distributed over hundreds of kilometers in Australia and South Africa, with the headquarters in the United Kingdom.

Together with facilities like the James Webb Space Telescope, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the LIGO gravitational wave detector, the new generation of massive optical telescopes and the ITER fusion reactor, the SKA will be one of humanity's cornerstone physics machines in the 21st century.

Philip Diamond, director-general of the SKA organization which has led the design of the telescope, added: “Like Galileo's telescope in its time, the SKA will revolutionize how we understand the world around us and our place in it. Today's historic signature shows a global commitment behind this vision, and opens up the door to generations of groundbreaking discoveries.”

It will help address fundamental gaps in our understanding of the universe, enabling astronomers from its participating countries to study gravitational waves and test Einstein's theory of relativity in extreme environments, investigate the nature of the mysterious fast radio bursts, improve our understanding of the evolution of the universe over billions of years, map hundreds of millions of galaxies and look for signs of life in the universe.

Two of the world's fastest supercomputers will be needed to process the unprecedented amounts of data emanating from the telescopes, with some 600 petabytes expected to be stored and distributed worldwide to the science community every year, or the equivalent of over half a million laptops worth of data. 

Close to 700 million euros (787.5 million USD) worth of contracts for the construction of the SKA will start to be awarded from late 2020 to companies and providers in the SKA's member countries, providing a substantial return on investment for those countries. Spinoffs are also expected to emerge from work to design, with startups already being created out of some of the design work with an impact reaching far beyond astronomy.

Over 1,000 engineers and scientists in 20 countries have been involved in designing the SKA over the past five years, with new research programs, educational initiatives and collaborations being created in various countries to train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The signing concludes four years of negotiations by government representatives and international lawyers, and kicks off the legislative process in the signing countries, which will see SKAO enter into force once five countries including all three host countries have ratified the treaty through their respective legislatures.