The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Observatory (SKAO) has announced that France has become the international organisation’s fourteenth member. French President Emmanuel Macron signed the documents of accession in March, and the country’s membership has now come into effect. With the accession of France, the membership of the SKAO has increased by 100% since it came into being, in 2021.

“After many years of contributing to the SKA project, it is a great pleasure to welcome France as a member of the Observatory,” highlighted SKAO Council chair Dr Filippo Zerbi. “As well as a national legacy of excellence in astronomy across centuries, French institutions’ expertise in supercomputing for big science makes France an invaluable partner as the SKAO progresses towards early science operations in the coming months.”

With its head office in the UK, the SKAO is composed of two separate radio telescope arrays, located in South Africa and Australia. The South African array covers mid-range radio frequencies and the Australian array covers the low radio frequency range.

“France is proud to join SKAO, which is building the world’s largest radio telescope arrays in this frequency range,” affirmed French Higher Education, Research and Space Ministry director-general for research and innovation Jean-Luc Moullet. “This ambitious international collaboration demonstrates what countries can achieve together, far beyond what any could accomplish alone. France is contributing through its industry and scientific community – astronomers, computer and data scientists – building on decades of investment in radio astronomy and coordinated national efforts to support SKAO’s mission.”

SKA-France, which brings together nine academic institutions, is the national coordinator for the country’s SKA activities. Further, the country has set up the Extreme Computing Lab for Astronomical Telescopes (ECLAT), to handle the significant computing challenges that will be posed by the huge data streams the SKAO will generate. To this end, ECLAT is a research and development lab that combines public and private partners. France already actively takes part in the SKA technical group known as SCOOP, which is devoted to minimising the energy consumption of Science Data Processing (SDP) computational processes. French scientific institutions are already represented in 13 of the 14 SKA Science Working Groups, including co-chairing two of them.

French industry was awarded its first SKA construction contract last year. That was to computing specialist Bull for producing SDP hardware for the telescope. This will process and reduce the very great data volumes from each of the telescope arrays, to produce detailed sky images. The first installations of this hardware will take place in Australia, later this year.