The Indian government has signed the agreement that allows the country into the SKA Organisation and will from now on be fully involved in the development of the SKA radio telescope. India joins Australia, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom in the task of the SKA into an intergovernmental organization with a treaty to formalize the relationship between the project and its members.
SKA (Square Kilometre Array) is one of the biggest scientific projects of this beginning of the third millennium and represents the next generation of radio astronomical instruments. Only a few weeks ago, the Chinese government signed a letter of intent with the SKA Organisation. Yesterday Dr. R.K. Sinha, secretary of the Indian Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) signed the agreement on behalf of his government that has made India a full memebr of the project.
This agreement is the culmination of years of work in which India has already contributed to the SKA project. In particular, the Indian National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) is the nstitute that will oversee the work within the project. India is already involved in the development of the technologies that will be used in the SKA radio telescope with one of the pathfinders, telescopes used for scientific and technologic studies that precisely aim to gather information useful in the SKA’s design phase.
The Indian pathfinder is the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) activated in 1995 near Pune. With its 30 antennas of 45 meters in diameter, this array is important in the field of low-frequency radio astronomy and was boosted for this new task connected to the SKA project.
The GMRT is a very important institution for Indian scientific research but also because is a destination for visits by students of the area. For India it’s important to train its scientists and engineers because developing the nation in terms of science and technology also means a financial return. The Indian government hopes to obtain from the SKA project prestige as well as economic results such as the one arriving from commercial space launches.
The SKA project will go on for several more years. The first observations could start as early as 2020 but its expansion is expected to continue until 2030. Many Indian scientists are already carrying out research relevant for SKA, whose construction is scheduled to begin in 2018.
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