Meet Maria Grazia Labate - SKA-Low Telescope Engineer

I’m Maria Grazia Labate, I work for the SKA Organisation and I’m the telescope engineer for the Square Kilometre Array telescope that will be built here in Australia, so SKA1-Low. I’m from the south of Italy, so I grew up in Reggio Calabria. You know Italy is like a boot - I’m right in the toe of the boot. I always loved the scientific and physics aspect of life, so I went to school in a scientific school and then I went to university at a telecommunication engineering university and did my PhD in the Second University of Naples with electronic engineering. This is my second time here in Australia at the site where SKA1-Low will be built and there is a great emotion because I was here five years ago and five years ago of course we had pathfinder, precursors - so ASKAP, MWA there was the first prototype of the antenna here on the site for SKA1-Low but it’s amazing just to come back and see all the progress.

01:10 - I’m looking there that is one of our verification systems and then this is the whole station for SKA1 Low, so it’s just great. The thing that excites me most about this project is that we’re going to discover the unknown. It’s like a time machine and we are going back in time, and this is so cool. We will discover things of the universe that we don’t know we can imagine but we really don’t know that they’re there and what is more beautiful than this? .