The objective of the AENEAS project is to develop a concept and design for a distributed, federated European Science Data Centre (ESDC) to support the astronomical community in achieving the scientific goals of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The scientific potential of the SKA radio telescope is unprecedented and represents one of the highest priorities for the international scientific community. By the same token, the large scale, rate, and complexity of data the SKA will generate, present challenges in data management, computing, and networking that are similarly world-leading. SKA Regional Centres (SRC) like the ESDC will be a vital resource to enable the community to take advantage of the scientific potential of the SKA. Within the tiered SKA operational model, the SRCs will provide essential functionality which is not currently provisioned within the directly operated SKA facilities. AENEAS brings together all the European member states currently part of the SKA project as well as potential future EU SKA national partners, the SKA Organisation itself, and a larger group of international partners including the two host countries Australia and South Africa.

For more than two decades, the EU has been supporting free transnational access (TA) to existing national research infrastructures (RI). In particular, the optical/infrared and the advanced radio astronomy communities are now recognised as TA flagship communities. Their telescopes and instrumentation complement each other with respect to wavelength coverage, as well as spectral, spatial and time resolution, and therefore together form a cohesive suite of RIs that made ground breaking discoveries possible and thus strengthened Europe's leading role in international science. While scientists more and more rely on multi-wavelength and multi-disciplinary access to the best RIs, there is a quest by the RI providers for a sustainable funding scheme for TA, since establishing and maintaining outstanding RIs requires considerable resources. In this pilot, the best research institutions from both communities will combine their efforts to further improve and harmonize their services and to make best use of their RIs, allowing mutual and TA to telescopes, telescope networks, and data archives. This will facilitate multi-wavelengths and time-domain studies. TA shall be simplified by the development of a common proposal submission tool. Improved instruments, adaptive optics, and software to deliver science ready data products will boost the performance of our RIs. This pilot will address imminent threats to astronomical research from satellite mega constellations and commercial radio emitters, and finally, it will develop plans for a long-term mutual relationship and for a continued funding of TA beyond this pilot.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an international project to construct the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever conceived. The SKA will use hundreds of thousands of radio telescopes receivers, in three unique configurations, which will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky thousands of times faster than any system currently in existence. The SKA telescopes will be co-located in Africa and in Australia. South Africa’s Karoo desert will cover the core of the high and mid frequencies of the radio spectrum which will have telescopes spread all over the continent, with Australia’s Murchison region covering the low frequency range and hosting the survey instrument. The objective of the IN-SKA proposal is to support the implementation of the SKA, enabling the start of construction in 2018 and delivery of first science around 2020. To achieve this, the proposal plans to provide resources to complete the Detailed Design of the core SKA Infrastructure required in South Africa and Australia. The proposed programme will address the design of roads and civil works, power distribution to run the telescope and supporting computing facilities, antenna foundations and the specialist design of new buildings; buildings that will be suitable for maintaining a pristine radio-quiet environment needed to ensure that SKA is able to achieve its science goals. In addition to driving innovation in many areas, and supporting the SKA as an inspirational vehicle for skills, industry and outreach, the ultimate deliverables of tender documentation ready for construction will place European and other national industry in leading positions to benefit directly from implementation of the SKA in 2018.

ESCAPE (European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures) aims to address the Open Science challenges shared by ESFRI facilities (SKA, CTA, KM3Net, EST, ELT, HL-LHC, FAIR) as well as other pan-European research infrastructures (CERN, ESO, JIVE) in astronomy and particle physics. ESCAPE actions will be focused on developing solutions for the large data sets handled by the ESFRI facilities. These solutions shall: i) connect ESFRI projects to EOSC ensuring integration of data and tools; ii) foster common approaches to implement open-data stewardship; iii) establish interoperability within EOSC as an integrated multi-messenger facility for fundamental science. To accomplish these objectives ESCAPE will unite astrophysics and particle physics communities with proven expertise in computing and data management by setting up a data infrastructure beyond the current state-of-the-art in support of the FAIR principles. These joint efforts are expected result into a data-lake infrastructure as cloud open-science analysis facility linked with the EOSC. ESCAPE supports already existing infrastructure such as astronomy Virtual Observatory to connect with the EOSC. With the commitment from various ESFRI projects in the cluster, ESCAPE will develop and integrate the EOSC catalogue with a dedicated catalogue of open source analysis software. This catalogue will provide researchers across the disciplines with new software tools and services developed by astronomy and particle physics community. Through this catalogue ESCAPE will strive to cater researchers with consistent access to an integrated open-science platform for data-analysis workflows. As a result, a large community “foundation” approach for cross-fertilisation and continuous development will be strengthened. ESCAPE has the ambition to be a flagship for scientific and societal impact that the EOSC can deliver.