New Zealand Square Kilometre Array Industry Consortium

 “Matching infrastructure, capability and knowledge in a partnership with science.”

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope project is one of the four largest scientific projects of the century. When complete, the SKA will have a physical collecting area of one square kilometre, spread across thousands of individual telescopes, and has been designed answer some fundamental questions of science, including what is Dark Energy, what is the nature of dark matter, can we detect gravitational waves, when and how did the first stars and galaxies form, and is there other life in the Universe? For a detailed description of the key observations and science requirements for SKA, see the Design Reference Mission released by the SKA project office.

The New Zealand SKA Industry Consortium (NZSKAIC) was formed with two aims:

1. To work with the other SKA participants in NZ  towards furthering New Zealand’s contribution to SKA; and
2. To foster economic development through building industry capability to address the considerable technical challenges raised by SKA.

NZSKAIC has created a programme of initiatives to understand and promote the unique contribution New Zealand can make towards SKA, to foster collaboration with all parties, and to explore new models and approaches to working on large long term projects like SKA.

Structure of NZSKAIC

NZSKAIC is facilitated by the NZICT Group, the New Zealand industry organisation representing IT software, hardware, networks, services, education and training providers, and is co-chaired by Brett O’Riley, NZICT CEO and Dougal Watt, IBM NZ Chief Technologist.

NZSKAIC operates through a two tier membership structure comprised of:

• ‘Investor’ membership - members that contribute resources in kind to NZ SKA related activities; and
• ‘Participant’ membership - organisations that will respond to defined work packages once NZ SKA related activities underway

The current committee is comprised of the following investor members:
NZICT Group | IBM NZ | Telecom International | Kordia | Harmonic | Endace