Latest STFC Grant Award for Square Kilometre Array (SKA)

The STFC has announced the award of the latest grant to support the development of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope. The SKA is the next generation radio telescope. It will have approximately two orders of magnitude increase in sensitivity over existing instruments, enabling us to tackle a wide range of fundamental astrophysical problems such as the nature of dark energy, imaging the Epoch of reionisation when the first galaxies form, determining the origin of cosmic magnetism and testing gravity in the strong field limit. The UK is playing a leading role in the design and development of the instrument. Paul Alexander is the PI of the UK R&D programme which is a joint activity between Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester. This latest grant will fund our work through until 2012. In Cambridge we are particularly working on the overall costed system design, the design of low-frequency antenna elements, calibration, data flow and processing.