IT’S a huge undertaking which could open our eyes to the universe. But how can businesses be part of the ambitious Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project?

SKA system engineer Tim Stevenson will be travelling to County Durham on February 9 to talk about how businesses can play a role in the £1.3bn initiative, in which several countries across the globe are working together to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope.

Signatories from Australia, China, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK have agreed to share money and expertise to make this project a reality, and they’re also working with industry partners in the research and development of the telescope. More countries and companies are expected to get involved.

Stevenson will be in the region for the Spacetech conference – a County Durham Development Company event looking at the opportunities available in the space sector. He said the project would require goods and services such as IT, office and laboratory buildings, power generation and distribution technology, to name but a few. He said: “About 50 years ago, the UK might have been capable of building something like the SKA almost itself. That’s no longer true due to the decline of manufacturing, but where the UK design capability has moved in recent years is toward the very high end. One would expect there to be a great deal of UK tech in that area of the project.”

The budget for the project may seem large, but Stevenson admits the organisers will have to take a “stringent approach” to make the money stretch to a dream of this size.

The total collecting area will be around a square kilometre, with thousands of receptors extending 3,000 km from the telescope’s centre. It will be 50 times the sensitivity of the nearest current telescope, and capable of survey speeds 10,000 times faster.

It has been designed to fulfil a range of functions, from learning more about how stars formed just after the Big Bang, to analysing magnetic fields and looking for alien life. Stevenson said the first phase – which features 10% of the collecting area – could be in use by 2016, with full completion pencilled in for 2024.