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SKA Square Kilometre Array Bid
Will our SKA get a Yes! vote on 4 April?
This year, Wednesday 4 April is a crucial red-letter day on SA's investment and science calendar. It's the date when international board members of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope will decide if the core site for the giant astronomy instrument will be built in South Africa or in Australia.
Science and technology director general Phil Mjwara has said that if South Africa wins the bid, billions of rands will flow into the country. After updating Parliament's science and technology portfolio committee on the bid process, Mjwara noted the cost of building dishes for the MeerKAT radio telescope, in the Karoo, was about R1bn.
Mjwara said, "If we're spending about R1bn on 64 dishes, you can imagine that if all of the dishes for the SKA are going to be manufactured here - about 3 000 dishes - just do the maths. So huge resources are going to flow into South Africa. But it's not just going to be the huge resources; it's the intellectual capital that's going to flow in, with all the spin-offs in terms of some of the ICT and processing technology that we need for the country."
The 4 April decision will be made by four countries: China, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. For South Africa to win, three of these four SKA founding-member countries need to vote in our favour. South Africa's bid is focused on "things we are doing well", including having better infrastructure in place around the proposed core site, near Carnarvon in the Northern Cape. Media reports in Australia have stressed its political and economic stability, and have been interpreted as a swipe at SA and its partners.
If the country's bid succeeds, the SKA core site will be built in South Africa but some of the outermost radio reception dishes will be located in eight other African countries: Botswana, Ghana, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Kenya and Zambia.
The SKA project gets its name from the fact that the total radio wave receiving area of its 3 000 satellite dishes adds up to one square kilometre. About half of the dishes will be concentrated in a 5km wide core region, with the rest located further out, some up to 3 000km away. The SKA will combine signals received from thousands of small antennae to simulate a single giant radio telescope with extremely high sensitivity and resolution. Astronomers believe the power of the SKA instrument (50 times more powerful than any previous radio telescope) will help to unlock the universe's biggest mysteries, including the origin of dark energy and whether Einstein's gravitational waves really exist.
(Sourced from SAPA and other online news reports)
