The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with eventually over a square kilometre (one million square metres) of collecting area. The scale of the SKA represents a huge leap forward in both engineering and research & development towards building and delivering a unique instrument, with the detailed design and preparation now well under way.

As part of the science preparatory activities, the SKA runs “data challenges” for the science community. The purpose of these challenges is to inform the development of the data reduction pipelines for the Science Data Processors and Science Regional Centres and to allow the science community to get familiar with the standard products the SKA will deliver, and optimise their analyses to extract science results from them.