Status of the SKA project and the SKA Regional Centre Network

The aim of this talk is to present the status of the SKAO project and the SKA Regional Centre Network. The SKA project is an international effort to build two radio-interferometers that will be able to make revolutionary contributions to Astrophysics, Astrobiology, and Fundamental Physics. In January 2021 the SKA Observatory (SKAO) was established as the second intergovernmental organisation (IGO) in astronomy (after the ESO) in January 2021.
SKA-Low will consist of 130.000 low-frequency dipoles in Australia, and SKA-Mid will consist of 133 SKA+64 MeerKAT dishes in South Africa. The construction phase commenced in July 2021 and the procurement and tender for the contracts have been initiated, and at the time of writing 5 construction contracts have been pre-allocated to Spain. In addition, the observatory is planning to start a development program for new instrumentation.

The high data-rate and complexity of SKA will necessarily transform how scientists access, analyse and share data from observations, being considered a Big Data machine. A network of SKA Regional Centres (SRCs) is being established to take the science data products that will emerge from the SKAO to the final state required for science analysis. Those will constitute the core of SKA science, since analysis of SKA data will not be feasible out of them. The SRC Network will be part of an end-to-end system composed by the SKAO and the SRCs. The SRCs will provide the SKA community with access to data, computational resources and support to use the SKA and its data products, as well as a platform for collaborative science. To develop the SRC Network, several countries, including Spain, are building SRC prototypes that are the foundation of the work led by the SRC Steering Committee (SRCSC). In 2020, the SRCSC established seven working groups with wide participation from the Spanish community, and recently the SRCSC started a new phase to prototype specific components of the SRC Network.