‘No lobbying, no threatening’ in selection process, says SKA

The director-general of the Square Kilometre Array telescope project has denied that UK delegates behaved aggressively at a meeting to decide the location of the telescope’s administrative headquarters.

UK delegates are understood to have been surprised by the decision to make Italy the preferred bidder, with Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, the SKA admin team’s temporary home, in second place. However, Phil Diamond denies that anything untoward took place at the meeting on 2 March. “There was no lobbying, no threatening going on,” he told Research Fortnight.

In an editorial, the journal Nature said that the UK had acted like a “playground bully”. Moreover, Giovanni Bignami, the president of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, told Research Fortnight that the UK representatives made “a very aggressive statement” about the risks of moving the headquarters to Italy.