South Africa soon to receive SKA-Mid from China

The first middle-frequency dishes of the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope, the world's biggest astronomy observation network and an international mega-science project, will be transported to their destination in South Africa.

At a ceremony on Wednesday morning in a northwestern suburb of Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province, experts announced that the first batch of four Square Kilometer Array middle-frequency dishes, officially abbreviated as SKA-Mid, have passed quality examination and ready to be transported by heavy-lift trucks to a port in Tianjin, where they will be put on a ship to South Africa.

The Square Kilometer Array is an ambitious scientific endeavor involving several nations including China, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is not a single radio telescope, but a collection of various types of antennae called an array, and is spread over long distances with up to one square kilometer in total collecting surface area, the equivalent of 140 soccer fields.

The project is managed by the SKA Observatory, an intergovernmental organization based in Manchester in the UK.

China is responsible for the research and development of the SKA-Mid dishes as well as the production for the first 64 such instruments.

Most of the parts for the large parabolic dishes, including the main reflectors, servo devices and support arms, were designed and built by the 54th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corp, located in Shijiazhuang, which is the major Chinese contractor in the SKA project.

Yin Qiuhua, deputy project manager of the SKA-Mid, said that the first four dishes are scheduled to arrive in South Africa in the coming months and then be installed in the Karoo region.

Deliveries of the 64 SKA-Mid dishes are expected to be finished before the end of 2026, and all of them will be mounted in the Karoo region, according to him.

Another major section of the SKA project, the low-frequency antennas, or SKA-Low, will be located in the remote Murchison area in Western Australia.

Eight other African nations including Botswana, Ghana and Kenya will also house some of the mega-science mission's facilities.

All of the sites have been chosen for scientific and technical reasons, including radio quietness.