Science Data Challenges
As part of the science preparatory activities, the SKAO runs “Science Data Challenges” (SDCs) for the science community. The purpose of these challenges is to inform the development of the data reduction pipelines for the SDP and SRCNet and to allow the science community to get familiar with the standard products the SKA telescopes will deliver, and optimise their analyses to extract science results from them.
The SKAO Science data challenges (SDCs) deliver to the community simulated SKA science-ready data of increasing complexity. Each challenge exercise is designed to test data reduction processes that the community will need to employ to reach their final scientific results (in SKAO terminology, to produce Advanced Data products from Project-Level data products). Three challenges have been completed so far, and one is upcoming:
SDC1: source finding and characterization in radio continuum
Challenge closed, dataset and publication available
SDC2: source finding and characterization from HI image cubes
Challenge closed, dataset and publication available
SDC3: Cosmic Dawn/Epoch of reionization data analysis
Challenge closed, datasets and simulation publication available
Foreground removal (SDC3a) publication available
Inference (SDC3b) publication in progress
SDC4: Source finding in polarization for Cosmic Magnetism
Challenge should start soon.
Last modified on 04 September 2026