MeerKAT Telescope Data Archive SARAO South African Radio Astronomy Observatory

Overview

The MeerKAT Telescope Data Archive is the official repository for scientific data and data products produced by the MeerKAT radio telescope, operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). SARAO is a facility of the National Research Foundation (NRF), an agency of the South Africa Department of Science and Innovation. The archive is accessible at archive.sarao.ac.za and underwent a major interface update in 2025 to improve usability and accessibility.

The MeerKAT Telescope

MeerKAT is a 64-dish radio telescope array located in the Karoo region of the Northern Cape province of South Africa, on the South African Square Kilometre Array (SKA) site. The telescope was officially inaugurated on 13 July 2018 by Deputy President David Mabuza. It consists of 64 dishes of 13.5 metres in diameter each, providing 2,000 unique antenna pairs. MeerKAT is a precursor to the SKA-Mid telescope and is expected to be incorporated into SKA-Mid — a 197-dish array — later in the 2020s. In 2023, the MeerKAT team received the Royal Astronomical Society's Group Achievement Award.

Archive Holdings

The MeerKAT Archive serves as the principal index and access point for scientific observations made by the telescope since its inauguration. It contains raw telescope data, calibrated data products, radio continuum images, and spectral line data from all MeerKAT observing programmes. The archive hosts data from major surveys including the MeerKAT Galaxy Cluster Legacy Survey (MGCLS) and the MeerKAT Absorption Line Survey (MALS), among hundreds of other projects. It is expected to support ongoing research well into the 2030s. Data volumes are substantial — the MALS alone generated 1.6 petabytes of raw survey data.

Access

The MeerKAT Archive is accessible to professional astronomers and the public via archive.sarao.ac.za. Proprietary data is subject to an embargo period after which it enters the public domain. The archive supports user-level data transfers and provides documentation for data reduction and analysis. SARAO also offers introductory training videos and materials for student users accessing the archive for the first time.