An amazing announcement was made on 21 August in Sydney. The New Zealand government on that day signed a memorandum of understanding with Australia agreeing to join Australia’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array or SKA. The SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope and a mega-science project costing some 1.5 billion euros over the next decade or so. Nineteen countries are at present members of the SKA consortium, and the expectation (or hope) is that all these will contribute to the huge costs involved. This will easily be the biggest science project ever undertaken in either country, and one of the largest in the world in the early 21^st century. It is a project of extraordinary technological challenges, but also fantastic scientific goals of exploring the earliest moments soon after the creation of the universe using an instrument some 100 times more sensitive than any yet built.

The significance for each country is very different. Australia has long been one of the pioneers in radio-astronomy, notably with the opening of the 210-foot Parkes dish in 1961. Since then the Australia Telescope was commissioned in 1988 and is one of the world’s major radio interferometers. The story in New Zealand has been very different. Until this year there was no professional radio observatory in this country. Radio-astronomy has had a very late start here, and almost the first beginnings of radio-astronomy in a New Zealand university were about five years ago at the Auckland University of Technology, thanks to the efforts of Professor Sergei Gulyaev. At that time the benefits of New Zealand collaborating with Australia to host the giant SKA became apparent, as the resolution of a radio interferometer depends on its baseline, the maximum span across an array of dishes whose signals are combined. Adding sites in New Zealand would increase the baseline from 3000 to 5000 km, which would imply a significant gain in resolution.

Professor Sergei Gulyaev, radio-astronomer at the Auckland University of Technology

The problem with this plan was the almost non-existence of any radio facility in this country in 2004, when the plans were first hatched. Much has happened in five years. AUT has since installed a small 12-m steerable dish for radio astronomy some 70 km north of Auckland. It had its ‘first light’ in early August this year. In 2004 a New Zealand SKA committee was formed, known as SKANZ, to lobby the New Zealand government and ICT community about the benefits of having some SKA stations in New Zealand. SKANZ has had regular meetings over these years, has lobbied politicians and coordinated New Zealand industry groups, has made a submission to the organization running the Karen network that links NZ universities with ultra broadband internet, and coordinated these activities with astronomers in Australia also working towards SKA.

The AUT 12-m radio-telescope, at the opening ceremony in October 2008.

At first New Zealand politicians were not interested. Astronomy was not a national priority. The fact that Australia was already investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a Pathfinder radio-telescope and establishing associated institutes to run it, as a forerunner to SKA itself, made no impression.

SKA as a joint project of Australia and New Zealand

But eventually the arguments in favour of radio-astronomy won the day. What better way to catapult New Zealand into the modern era! Having 50 or 100 Gbits per second broadband between NZ and Australia could have many economic benefits. Developing the supercomputing requirements needed to handle the data could also have spin-offs for the modern technological society. What about electronics, signal processing, data handling and storage? – perhaps all these could benefit New Zealand’s economy. Perhaps just the prestige of participating in one of the biggest science projects ever, something New Zealand has never dreamt of doing before, would also improve the overall status of New Zealand science.

Suddenly New Zealand politicians woke up. To the credit of our former prime minister, Helen Clark, she recognized the opportunities of SKA in mid-2008. Although she lost the election later that year, the new government under John Key picked up where Clark had left off, and this led to the agreement for a joint Australia and NZ bid in August 2009 to host the SKA.

The SKANZ committee can relish the success of our work. I have just returned from a SKANZ meeting in Auckland where Dr Brian Boyle, the Australian SKA director, was also present. The joint Australia-NZ bid is now looking very strong. The other contender for the site, South Africa, in conjunction with neighbouring African countries, cannot offer a 5000 km baseline, nor the same security or radio-quiet sites, nor the same political stability, nor the same long and strong tradition in radio astronomy that Australia can. Nevertheless they undoubtedly have a good case and will lobby hard to promote it.

Another view of the new AUT radio-telescope, sited at Warkworth, about 70 km north of Auckland.

Here in Australia and in New Zealand we are quietly confident that when the decision of site selection for the SKA is taken, probably in mid-2012, Australia will win the bid and at least two, and perhaps three, SKA sites will also be located in New Zealand. If that happens, New Zealand astronomy will come of age and our radio astronomers (of which there are about three professionals in our universities) will find they are catapulted from almost nothing a few years ago into the forefront of 21^st century science.

(written 15 September 2009)

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