Germany

At a glance

• German industry was awarded the contract for the SKA-Mid telescope’s Band 5 receivers.
• The large German scientific community is represented in all 14 science working groups of the SKAO.
• SKA activities are coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, the Max Planck Society, the German Center for Astrophysics and the Association for Data-Intensive Radio Astronomy.
• Germany is home to the SKA pathfinder telescope in Effelsberg and six international German LOFAR stations. Germany is also involved in the development of the extended MeerKAT+ array and an SKA-Mid dish at the MeerKAT site in South Africa (SKAMPI).

National involvement

German scientists were involved in the idea of the SKA from the very beginning and participated actively in the various planning entities. As a member of the six SKAO consortia responsible, Germany was particularly involved in technical planning. The German scientific community contributed significantly to the planning and prototyping of the SKA-Mid dishes.

Germany will use the SKA for its own research in the field of radio astronomy and will continue to carry out development work on the instruments in South Africa and Australia. German institutions are conducting design studies for the SKA and operating pathfinder telescopes in Effelsberg, six international German LOFAR stations and the SKA-MPIfR telescope SKAMPI in South Africa. The Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn is developing and building receivers for SKA-Mid. The 14 telescopes provided by Germany to MeerKAT+ will become an integral part of SKA-Mid. 

Industrial participation

The German SKA node has close collaboration with the national space industry:

• As a subcontractor for the SKA-Mid telescope design, OHB Digital Connect has developed and built the first MeerKAT+ antenna financed by MPIfR, SARAO, and INAF. In total, 14 antennas will be built for the MeerKAT expansion.
• Together with the MPIfR and SARAO, the OHB Digital Connect GmbH has also built the SKA-MPIfR telescope (SKAMPI), a prototype dish for the SKA-Mid telescope, for technical commissioning and scientific use.
• OHB Digital Connect was awarded the contract for the SKA-Mid telescope’s Band 5 receivers which will  operate over the highest part of the SKA-Mid telescope's frequency range.
• A German company - VERTEX - was also involved in the construction of the SKA's predecessor telescope, MeerKAT.

Science interests 

As the science policy committee of the German Astronomical Society, the Council of German Observatories (RDS = Rat deutscher Sternwarten) represents all institutes engaged in astronomical research in Germany. The RDS also considers the SKA to be the telescope of the future. Germany is represented in all 14 SKAO scientific working groups and strives to play a leading role in important scientific projects in the fields of astrophysics and astroparticle physics, driven by the German astronomical community. This goes hand in hand with the development of technical innovations as a unique selling point. Another challenge the German astronomical community is helping to  address in the context of the SKA is large-scale data processing, which is needed to develop appropriate solutions for future IT problems.

Scientific aims for Germany using the SKA include testing  Einstein's general theory of relativity. The SKA will allow us to further explore the limits of this theory. Pulsars - rapidly rotating neutron stars - are particularly useful for this purpose and will be detected and studied using SKA-Mid.

So far, at least three ERC grants have been awarded to scientists working in Germany, using SKA pathfinder telescopes for their research. In addition, a junior professorship in cooperation between Bielefeld University and the MPIfR. and a new professorship in astronomy at the Ruhr University Bochum have been established.

The annual Radio Science Conference has been held in Germany for over ten years. In 2025 the SKAO General Science Meeting took place in Görlitz, Germany.

Wider impact

The new German Center for Astrophysics (Deutsches Zentrum für Astrophysik - DZA) is being built in Görlitz. The DZA will ensure access for German science to future large-scale international projects and also open up opportunities for industry to participate in tenders (see impact case study below).

In order to prepare science and future generations for the enormous amounts of data that telescopes such as the SKA will generate in the future, a consortium of eight research institutes from the fields of radio astronomy and data science has been formed in North Rhine-Westphalia. In the cluster “B3D – Big Bang to Big Data”, they are working together to improve the understanding and processing of radio astronomical data, both methodologically and structurally. This is accompanied by the goal of establishing new qualification programs for young scientists in this interdisciplinary context.

Together with the Physics Education Department at the University of Siegen, the MPIfR implemented the MoonBounce school project, funded by the BMFTR (Federal Ministry of Education and Research), as part of “Science Year 2023 – Our Universe”. In this project, school students sent messages in Morse code to the Moon. The signals were reflected off the moon's surface, travelled back to Earth, and were received by the SKA pathfinder telescope in Effelsberg. The signals were then sent back to the school via the Internet. The aim is to get school students interested in radio astronomy and STEM subjects in general.

Furthermore, the SKA-MPIfR telescope SKAMPI is not only a research facility; it will also be available to universities for application-oriented training of their students.