Ein riesiges Radio -Teleskop sollte die großen Fragen des Universums beantworten. Jetzt wurde das Quadratkilometer -Array -Projekt durch Fehlverhaltensansprüche erschüttert
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/22/square-kilometre-array-observatory-skao-western-australia-radio-telescope-misconduct-allegations-ntwnfb
6 Kommentare
As a South African, I’m just really glad that its not us that’s involved in this. I had my worries when I saw the article headline.
They lost some public funds and tried to hide that with some budget report number shuffling? Yikes. Maybe making them exempt from financial laws wasn’t a great idea.
The question is whether funds being deposited in trading accounts is a standard procedure for projects of this nature, or whether it is adventurous risk-taking. If latter, who was responsible for this decision.
Radio astronomer here- I confess I don’t fully understand the details, as the article is probably vague for legal reasons, but I DO know a lot about the SKAO (and in fact visited their HQ in Perth, Australia just last month!).
The [Square Kilometer Array (SKA)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array) is the next generation radio telescope being built in both South Africa (higher GHz frequencies) and Australia (lower MHz frequencies), and basically it will be a factor of 10 more sensitive when it comes online (supposed to be by end of the decade!). It’s a *massive* undertaking with billions of dollars involved, and dozens of countries- basically all of them except the USA, which hopes to build the [ngVLA](https://ngvla.nrao.edu/) (though with the current funding crisis who knows). So the biggest new radio astronomy project in my lifetime!
Obviously this means a lot of money flowing through various countries, and while projects of this nature always face delays I suppose the evidence here is someone’s pocketing some of the funds. That’s frankly pretty wild if so- I can’t think of any other astronomy project where this happened, since typically you have to fill out SO MUCH PAPERWORK to get anything going, but scientists are humans first so guess anything is possible. I suppose we’ll see what happens.
This sucks. A loss in the public’s confidence is the last thing we need right now.
And if true, whistle-blowing details like these would likely come from someone working in and around the SKAO financial offices. Someone with access to the raw financial disclosures.
Although, the Guardian didn’t have to include issues related to the grant clawback and power generation. It reads like a smear campaign to include unrelated details in order to emphasise „mismanagement.“
The power source on site needs to be Radio Frequency Interference free as much as possible. A diesel generator, likely multiple generators, is a self contained unit that’s much easier to enclose in a faraday cage or locate behind walls to prevent stray radiation from leaking out. A huge array of solar panels spread out widely across the Australian desert feeding electricity for 512 sites and 131,000 dipole antennas is alot more complex to implement.
Maybe they can use the telescope to find the money.