Australia

Australia will host the SKAO’s low-frequency telescope, an array of 131,072 antennas grouped in 512 stations, with up to 65km maximum separation between the most distant stations, located in Western Australia. The SKA site is at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, a nationally protected radio quiet zone operated by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). A later expansion of the telescope is envisioned in Australia in a future phase of the project.

Australia will also host facilities external to the telescope site, where critical scientific and technical support for SKAO operations will take place.

Composite image of the SKAO’s Low-frequency telescope in Western Australia. The image blends a real photo (on the left) of the SKA-Low prototype station AAVS2.0 which is already on site, with an artist’s impression of the future SKA-Low stations as they will look when constructed. These dipole antennas, which will number in their hundreds of thousands, will survey the radio sky in frequencies as low at 50Mhz. Credit: SKAO/ICRAR

View the Australian SKA site on Google maps

We recognise and acknowledge the Indigenous people and cultures that have traditionally lived on the lands on which our facilities are located.