Malta has been invited to join an international board of experts overseeing the building of the world’s largest radio telescope, which will survey the heavens 10,000 times faster than present technology.

The news comes just as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, which will reveal untold secrets about the universe, last month got the green light for €650m construction of the telescope’s first phase.

Astrophysicist Kristian Zarb Adami.

The SKA – which will have thousands of antennas and dishes in Australia and Africa, and which is one of the biggest scientific infrastructures on earth – is hoping to answer some of life’s elusive questions, such as: is there other life in the universe?

Anticipation is high among leading scientists and engineers that the SKA project will challenge Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, enable the understanding of black hole formation and pave the way for a wealth of other discoveries.

So it is an exciting time for the island, through the Malta Council for Science and Technology, to join 11 countries as an observer on the SKA Board. After a year, Malta should transition to full membership.

MCST chairman Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando confirmed he had appointed astrophysicist Kristian Zarb Adami as his representative on the board.

Securing observer status was an honour for the country, Dr Pullicino Orlando said, especially since until a few years ago it was “unheard of that Malta could have an interest, let alone a role within the space sector”.

SKA director general Phil Diamond told The Sunday Times of Malta that observer status let the island learn about the project, participate in SKA design and activities, and prepare its application for full membership.

Prof. Diamond said the request from Malta did not come as a surprise even though the island was not renowned for its radio astronomy pedigree.

The recent formation of the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy, within the University of Malta, had been critical in securing a position.

“This indicated Malta was serious about developing capability in astronomy instrumentation,” Prof. Diamond added.

Dr Zarb Adami, who is a director of ISSA, said it was a “great honour and responsibility” to represent Malta on what will be one of the biggest ground-based observatories for the next 30 years.

It’s the equivalent of designing the satellite decoder you have under your TV, but more challenging

A lecturer at Oxford University’s Astrophysics Department, Dr Zarb Adami is already involved in the SKA project, leading the signal processing work package. This means he is responsible for taking the signal that comes from the satellite dish or TV antenna and turning it into the image you see on on the television screen.

“It’s the equivalent of designing the satellite decoder you have under your television set, but more challenging because it entails handling data that is a thousand times faster than your average cable connection,” Dr Zarb Adami explained.

Asked why this telescope project was so important and how it would affect people’s lives, Dr Zarb Adami said although the scientific results might not have an instant direct bearing, the technology spin-offs from the SKA would.

Malta, he said, was already witnessing a spin-off from an antenna designed for the mega-telescope and the university was seeking to commercialise this.

The advantage of this design is that this antenna can combine numerous communication channels – mobile, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS – into a single antenna, reducing the number of different antennas in a mobile phone.

More than 100 companies and institutions in 20 countries are involved in the research and development, working across 12 time zones on this ground-breaking project, which will for the first time enable humans to comprehensively map the universe.

SKA communications manager William Garnier said that with the amount of information this mega-telescope would collect from the sky, it would push computing technology and boost education and career opportunities, as well as generate socioeconomic benefits for the countries involved.

Zooming in on the Square Kilometre Array project

The SKA will eventually use thousands of dishes and up to a million antennas that will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky much faster than any previous system.

Its unique configuration will give the mega-telescope unrivalled scope in observations, largely exceeding the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The SKA will permit a wealth of other discoveries in areas as diverse as the formation of planets similar to the earth and the origin of cosmic magnetic fields. But the most significant discoveries to be made by the SKA are those we cannot predict.

Phase 1 of the SKA – the construction – will start in 2018 and finish in 2023, already producing over five times the estimated global internet traffic of 2015 in raw data, the equivalent of more than 35,000 DVDs worth of content every second.