Meet Daniel Hayden - SKA-Low System Engineer

So I’m the system engineer for SKA-Low and I work with project managers, domain specialists and various other people, to check at a high level that everything is going to fit together when integrated and effectively to check that everything will fit together and do what it is meant to do. I’m originally from South Africa, I was born in Johannesburg and when I was 18, 19 I left to go study in Cape Town and then I studied afterwards in Europe in a few different European universities To hear at some point that South Africa would or could be involved in one of the biggest astronomy projects ever attempted was obviously extremely exciting and that was the inroad for me. So this is the first time I’ve been to the Australian outback I think it’s awesome - it’s got a distinctive colour to the soil which I really like the iron rich soil, the vegetation is really interesting it reminds me in some ways of South African vegetation in arid parts of South Africa but obviously with differences - we don’t have kangaroos hopping around in South Africa and giant lizards. Construction is scheduled to begin in South Africa and Australia in 2021- middle to end of 2021 This telescope is an eye that can look billions of light years away and we don’t know what we’ll discover so there’s a lot of science cases that have been defined for specific things that the SKA will investigate but I’m specifically excited for what’s going to surprise us. .