| 2019-07 NZ Government Decided to Quit SKA |
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| July 2019 | |
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The NZ Government announced on July 2 2019 on the MBIE website to terminate all NZ Government involvements in the SKA in 2020. https://www.mbie.govt.nz/about/news/new-zealand-will-not-pursue-associate-membership-in-the-ska-observatory/ The announcement was made without consultation with the New Zealand Alliance team which was set up by MBIE in 2014 as the official entity to contribute to the pre-construction design of SKA. All NZA members were shocked by the announcement. The Vice Chancellor of AUT University issued a public statement on July 4. The statement pin-pointed the contradictions expressed by the announcement, and provided a substantiation of the efforts and profiles of NZA in SKA which is being managed with a ‘Software’ project scheme. The statement can be found here: https://news.aut.ac.nz/news/missing-the-ska-bus There have been a lot of press coverages on NZA status recently (first half of 2019) from a political perspective. Most if not all of them have got some details missing or incorrect. This latest press statement from AUT VC appears to be the most professionally written.
The SKA Office based in Manchester has also responded: https://www.skatelescope.org/news/nz-involvement-in-ska/.
“We regret the New Zealand government’s decision, indicating they will not seek any form of membership in the SKA Observatory, and hence not participate in the construction of the SKA telescopes”, said Prof. Philip Diamond, SKA Organisation’s Director-General. “We are grateful for New Zealand’s important contribution to the design of the telescopes, their expertise in computing and signal processing in particular helped us develop a solid design for the SKA’s digital and computing infrastructure, which we can now take forward to construction.”
What has New Zealand’s involvement in the SKA been?
In the Central Signal Processor Consortium, NZ has been contributing to the SKA1-mid telescope correlator with NRC Canada, the SKA1-low telescope correlator with CSIRO and ASTRON, pulsar search with Manchester, Oxford and Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, and pulsar timing with Swinburne University. In the Science Data Processor Consortium, NZ has been contributing to the imaging pipeline algorithms, analysis, and implementations together with CSIRO and Manchester, and to the compute platform middleware, software and compute node design with ASTRON, Cambridge, and Oxford.
Note that compute node design is where the Compucon team participated and collaborated with researchers from ASTRON, Cambridge and Oxford.
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