SKA South Africa (NRF-SARAO)

SKA South Africa is the name long used for South Africa’s part in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope. The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), a facility of the National Research Foundation, now coordinates SKA South Africa, and the project office is based in Mowbray, Cape Town, according to a provider record checked in August 2026.

Registered name

SKA South Africa (NRF-SARAO)

Type

National research project (radio astronomy, managed by NRF-SARAO)

Fields funded

Physics, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, engineering and IT

Website

ska.ac.za

A telescope on two continents

The SKA takes its name from a collecting area of one square kilometre, or one million square metres. The SKA is co-located in Africa and Australia: South Africa’s Karoo hosts the mid-frequency dish array, while Western Australia hosts the low-frequency antennas. The intergovernmental SKA Observatory, headquartered at Jodrell Bank in the United Kingdom, leads the project, and construction formally began in December 2022.

SARAO says the SKA will exceed the image resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope by 50 times and will be able to image huge areas of sky in parallel. South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope, 90 kilometres outside Carnarvon, will be integrated into the SKA’s mid-frequency component.

Why the Karoo

Radio telescopes need places free of interference from cell phones, radios and other electronics. The desert regions of South Africa offer that radio-quiet backdrop, and the Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act of 2007 lets the Minister of Science protect such areas through regulations. SKA South Africa ran a land acquisition programme, and the CSIR carried out a strategic environmental assessment for SKA Phase 1 in the Karoo Central Astronomy Advantage Area.

Building a skills base

From its early years, SKA South Africa invested in students, because the country needed its own astronomers, engineers and data scientists to host a project of this scale. SKA South Africa has supported students in physics, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, engineering and IT, and SARAO now manages undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships through the NRF’s online system.

SARAO’s Graduate In-Training Programme gives recent graduates hands-on experience in engineering, data science, software development and project management, with mentorship, project involvement, workshops and networking, and a possible path into employment at SARAO or elsewhere.

BursariesAfrica’s older SKA South Africa guide describes applications from about June to August, but has not been refreshed with 2027 details.

How to research SKA South Africa

Follow SARAO’s vacancies page for scholarship and graduate calls, and watch its short video on MeerKAT. Learn why data processing is one of the SKA’s biggest challenges, since computing students are in demand.

See the SARAO undergraduate scholarship for current dates.