Australia and South Africa To Share the Square Kilometer Array

ananyo writes "The battle for the world's largest radio telescope has ended in a draw. As an earlier Slashdot story suggested, South Africa and Australia are to split the Square Kilometre Array, a €1.5 billion (US$1.9 billion) project made up of 3,000 15-meter-wide dishes and an even larger number of simple antennas. The decision was announced at a meeting outside of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, following a vote by SKA's international board."

Comments

You know negotiations succeeded when...

[schitso]

...each side comes out equally unhappy.

Really?

[Zaldarr]

You know, you could just give it to one of us. We can take bad news. What the hell even is this? Some kind of game children played in the 90's where everybody won? I was under the impression that we were doing science.

So it's a half-kilometer array?

[cpu6502]

No. They are splitting the frequencies, which is a pretty good idea: "Most of the subsequent telescope dishes and mid-frequency aperture arrays will be built in Southern Africa, while the low-frequency aperture array antennas will be positioned in Australia." - One kilometer of MF and one kilometer of LF reception.