New Zealand SKA Research & Development Consortium

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken. It is a machine designed to answer some of the big questions of our time: what is Dark Energy? Was Einstein right about gravity? What is the nature of dark matter? Can we detect gravitational waves? When and how did the first stars and galaxies form? What was the origin of cosmic magnetism? How do Earth-like planets form? Is there life, intelligent or otherwise, elsewhere in the Universe?

The New Zealand SKA Research and Development Consortium, or SKARD, aims to foster collaboration both within New Zealand and internationally, and to liaise with industry, government and other groups to advance New Zealand’s contribution to the SKA. Members are drawn from all of New Zealand’s major research universities and have interests in signal processing, imaging and inference, high performance computing, antenna design and radio astronomy. We seek to enable coherent New Zealand-wide efforts to effectively contribute to the SKA project and to bring about a greater understanding of SKA requirements in key industry sectors.

Membership is open to New Zealand-based researchers undertaking SKA-related research and nominations can be made to the chair or any other member and will be discussed at meetings. We invite you to think how you, or your organization, could contribute towards overcoming the technical challenges that stand in the way of these tremendous science goals. The full terms of reference for the group can be found here.

Note that New Zealand's overall SKA efforts are lead by the Ministry of Economic Development, under the guidance of Jonathan Kings and members of the government SKA project team. Contact information for the SKA team is here.