Radio Telescope Faces “Extremely Concerning” Threat From Satellite Constellations

upstart writes:

Radio telescope faces "extremely concerning" threat from satellite constellations - SpaceNews:

A multibillion-dollar radio telescope is moving into its construction phase while still working to raise funding and deal with satellite megaconstellations whose interference "change the game" for their plans.

In a June 29 talk at the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society, Philip Diamond, director general of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA)[*] Observatory, announced that the observatory's council had formally approval plans to move into the construction phase of the radio telescope.

SKA is two separate facilities. SKA-Low, in Western Australia, will eventually be an array of more than 130,000 antennas performing observations at low frequencies. SKA-Mid will feature 197 dishes in South Africa for midrange radio frequencies, including 64 dishes of the existing MeerKAT array there.

The council's decision allowed the SKA to move into its construction phase on July 1. "We won't see shovels in the round on the first of July," he said, but rather requests for proposal to build various aspects of the two facilities. The observatory expects that construction to be completed by 2029.

The SKA is designed to support a wide range of astronomy research, from studies of dark energy and pulsars to astrobiology. The concept for the SKA dates back three decades, when astronomers first considered concepts for a radio telescope that, as the name suggests, would span a square kilometer. Those concepts later evolved to the current design with facilities on two continents.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.