How the SKA is turning a $3 billion build into a window on the universe
Around 800 kilometres north of Perth, on the ancestral lands of the Wajarri Yamaji people, one of the world’s most ambitious science infrastructure projects is starting to deliver. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – a $3 billion telescope project spanning two continents – has already produced the most detailed map ever made of the magnetic fields running through our galaxy.
It is an impressive scientific achievement – and a reminder that discoveries like these depend on equally ambitious infrastructure.
RLB has provided cost management and quantity surveying services on the SKA project since 2012, working alongside CSIRO and Aurecon. Mark Bendotti, past Managing Director of RLB Western Australia and now Senior Consultant, attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony, 14 years after first engaging with the project at the concept stage.
“A scientific discovery like this depends on an infrastructure backbone. The SKA backbone spans roads, power, communications, processing facilities and thousands of individual components working together,” says Mark Bendotti, Senior Consultant at RLB.
Reading signs across the sky
Using the CSIRO’s radio telescope at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, astronomers tracked how radio waves from distant galaxies shift as they pass through the Milky Way’s magnetic fields.
Red and blue markings on the resulting map show the direction of those fields – red towards and blue away from Earth. This is helping to build a picture of forces that are otherwise completely invisible.
More than 1,500 observations across over 1,400 unique fields contributed to the result, published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. CSIRO research scientist Tim Galvin has said the goal is “building up an atlas of those telltale signs” across the sky.
The first attempt at this atlas was made from the northern hemisphere 17 years ago, but the full picture has remained elusive until now, as the best view of the Milky Way is from the south.
The infrastructure behind the insight
This discovery was made using existing CSIRO infrastructure at the Murchison site, offering an early glimpse of what the completed SKA could make possible.
When operational, the full SKA-Low array will generate data at rates exceeding global internet traffic. This data must be processed, transported and stored without compromising the radio-quiet conditions essential to the telescope’s performance.
RLB embraced this unusual brief in 2012 as part of the Australian bid team. Since then, we have been providing cost management and quantity surveying advice to CSIRO and Aurecon across a 40-kilometre radius of infrastructure.
The scale behind the science
The numbers behind the SKA are impressive:
• 131,072 antennas – each two metres tall and shaped like Christmas trees, form SKA-Low at the Murchison site
• 197 dish antennas – forming SKA-Mid in South Africa, receiving mid-frequency radio waves
• 16 participant countries and more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and policymakers
• 230 kilometres of roads and tracks
• 210 kilometres of power reticulation
• 650,000 square metres of ground plane mesh
Together, the two arrays will give the SKA a collecting area of roughly one square kilometre – the source of its name – and make it 50 times more sensitive than any existing radio instrument, surveying the sky ten thousand times faster than current technology allows.
Building for silence
The central challenge of the SKA build is one most construction teams never need to consider: the building itself must not interfere with the instrument it houses.
The Central Processing Facility – officially named Ngurra-Maga, meaning “home of the head” in the Wajarri language, and quite literally the brain of the telescope – uses a fully welded, double-shielded steel enclosure to stop signals generated inside – by computers, cabling, even lighting – from leaking out and contaminating the antennas’ readings. It must be silenced within this specially shielded building, otherwise it would interfere with the ultra-sensitive antennas outside.
That enclosure incorporates two Faraday cages – metal screens that block electromagnetic energy from escaping – because the facility’s servers must process many terabytes of data every day without leaking stray radio-frequency interference towards the antennas. FPGAs filter that data to retain only the most valuable information before it travels over the 10TB/s fibre link to supercomputers in Perth. So thorough is the shielding that even the entrances function as airlocks: as Prof. Philip Diamond, Director-General of the Square Kilometre Array Organisation, puts it, the inner door will not open until the outer one is closed.
To manage the practical risks of building in one of the world’s most remote locations, the facility is being prefabricated in modules and transported to the site. This approach keeps labour costs within budget and reduces the quality risks that come with remote construction.
Respecting country while reaching for the stars
The site itself carries deep significance. CSIRO has named it Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, “sharing sky and stars” in the Wajarri language.
The project has been carefully planned to minimise its impact on Country: retaining existing tracks, limiting land clearing and working with Wajarri Elders, heritage experts, archaeologists and ethnologists who have surveyed more than 400 kilometres of land to identify and protect sites of cultural significance.
From the outback to the supercomputer
SKA-Low captured its first image in March 2025, with image quality set to improve steadily as the 131,000 antennas are installed in phases.
Data from the SKA-Low will flow to a custom processing facility on site – delivered by Ventia as principal SKA-Low infrastructure contractor, alongside CSIRO and Aurecon – before travelling by fibre-optic cable to the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Perth – another project RLB has helped deliver – for processing and imaging. This project is targeted for completion in 2028.
As CSIRO’s Stefan Duchesne has observed, “science is innovation”. The value of projects like the SKA is not only found in the discoveries they produce, but in the data they make available for others to explore, challenge and expand.
RLB’s role in the bigger picture
“The SKA is one of the most ambitious scientific infrastructure projects ever undertaken,” says Adam Robinson, Managing Director at RLB.
“In many ways, it faces the same challenges as any major project: long-term planning, technical complexity, collaboration across multiple stakeholders and disciplined delivery. The difference is that the outcome isn’t a building, road or utility. It’s a tool that could transform our understanding of the universe.”
FURTHER INFORMATION:
Kris Goodfellow
