Highlights of the SKA1-Mid telescope architecture

Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) will construct two radio telescopes: SKA-Low in Australia and SKA-Mid in South Africa. When completed, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be the largest radio telescope on Earth, with unprecedented sensitivity and scientific capability. The first phase of SKA-Mid (called SKA1-Mid) includes an array of 197 dish antennas incorporating the recently completed MeerKAT dishes to cover the frequency range of 350 MHz to 15.4 GHz. The 19 Tb / s digitized data stream is transported from the dishes in the remote Karoo to Cape Town where data are correlated and processed through high-performance computing systems. The demanding scientific performance requires extremely accurate timing and synchronization of the data measured by the distributed dishes. The combination of large-scale deployment, significant real-time processing, geographic distribution, and limited budget poses significant challenges for the physical, control, and processing architectures. We present the architectural highlights of the SKA1-Mid Telescope baseline design, for which its Critical Design Review was completed in 2019 and construction was started in July 2021.