This is a book about a grand vision radio telescope project called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and its transition from a global grass-roots collaboration among astronomers and engineers in the early 1990s to a formal legal entity two decades later, on the path towards an Inter-Governmental Organisation constructing a science mega-project. The …
In April 1933, at a small gathering at a meeting of the US National Committee of the International Scientific Radio Union (URSI), Bell Labs scientist Karl Guthe Jansky announced that he had detected 20.5 MHz (14.6 m) radio emis-sion from the Milky Way. Jansky used a novel directional antenna based on an invention by AT&T Bell Labs colleague, Edmond Bruce, that rotated every…