The SKA Observatory Convention was agreed in May 2018 and signed in Rome on 12th March 2019 by seven initial members. The SKA Observatory Council is composed of the SKA member states and other countries intending to join to the project. To deal with all this, the SKA now has its own inter-governmental organisation, like a mini-United Nations, referred to as the SKA Observatory Council. It is not just about building the telescopes, but also the infrastructure required (not only scientific but also civil), the communications and negotiations necessary and then of course the computing power to process the vast amounts of data expected from the SKA. Managing such a large, global collaboration requires an organisation on the scale of nations. The SKA is a multinational, worldwide project and although the telescopes themselves are found in Africa and Australia, the headquarters is located in the UK at the famous UNESCO heritage site at Jodrell Bank near Manchester. It will be a super sensitive telescope, probing our universe back to its earliest times when it was mainly full of hydrogen gas just before the very first stars turned on. The SKA will be the largest scientific facility in the history of human kind. In fact, altogether the SKA will comprise of hundreds of traditional radio dishes and more than 100,000 small (TV like) antennas, creating an effective telescope area of a kilometre in size! The SKA will consist of thousands of small radio telescopes sprawled across the deserts in two continents half deployed in the Karoo desert of South Africa and the other half in the Murchison in Western Australia. This is really hard to do for an optical telescope but it gets easier if we consider building radio telescopes. Astronomers can cheat a little bit here in avoiding making one supersized telescope, by joining many smaller telescopes together to mimic a larger one. Imagine though, if we could build telescopes across countries, how big could we make them? This is what the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) sets out to do. So how big can we build our telescopes? Well, at present, there are some enormous optical telescopes planned, such as the Thirty Metre Telescope or the Extremely Large Telescope of sizes 30-40m across. The bigger our telescope (lens or mirror), the more light we can collect and the deeper into the universe we can see. Space Telescope in orbit around the Earth, bigger is always better. We do astronomy, whether it is in our back garden at night, or using the Hubble
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