About SARAO

The SKA project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with a square kilometre (one million square metres) of collecting area.

arrow The project
The SKA telescope will be co-located in Africa and in Australia. It will have an unprecedented scope in observations, exceeding the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope by a factor of 50 times, whilst also having the ability to image huge areas of sky in parallel.

arrow SARAO
The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) is a National Facility managed by the National Research Foundation and incorporates all national radio astronomy telescopes and programmes.

arrow Location
The desert regions of South Africa, provide the perfect radio quiet backdrop for the high and medium frequency arrays that will form a critical part of the SKA’s ground-breaking continent wide telescope.

arrow MeerKAT radio telescope
The South African MeerKAT radio telescope, situated 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, is a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope and will be integrated into the mid-frequency component of SKA Phase 1.

arrow Hartebeesthoek Site in Johannesburg, South Africa
SARAO Hartebeesthoek Site is located west of Johannesburg, South Africa. built in 1961 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States of America. An 85 foot = 26 metre diameter antenna was used to get data from, and send commands to, many unmanned US space probes going beyond Earth orbit.

arrow Land acquisitions
The SKA South Africa Land Acquisition Programme is one of many projects that SKA South Africa is currently embarking on to make the SKA a reality.

arrow Strategic Environmental Assessment
The Department of Environmental Affairs in partnership with Department of Science and Technology have commissioned the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to undertake a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) for SKA Phase 1 South Africa in the Karoo Central Astronomy Advantage Area. View this page in Afrikaans

arrow Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act
The Astronomy Geographic Advantage (AGA) Act of 2007 is legislation that gives the Minister of Science and Technology the power to protect areas, through regulations, that are of strategic national importance for astronomy and related scientific endeavours.

arrow Meet the team
Meet the SARAO management team.

arrow SKA acronymns
Acronyms commonly used by the SKA community.

arrow Commercialisation

We are responsible for maximizing value for the benefit of South Africa by leveraging the organization’s products, services, and high-value engineering and scientific competence

arrow Intellectual Property Protection at SARAO
Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.

arrow Gallery
Image and video gallery

Did you know?

The SKA will be so sensitive that it will be able to detect an airport radar on a planet tens of light years away.