Pretoria - A local engineering manufacturing company has completed the world’s first back-up structure for the MeerKAT telescope, the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the southern hemisphere, and a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
Tricom Structures, a manufacturer of telecommunication infrastructure in Waltloo, on Wednesday made public the structure that will hold the MeerKAT’s dish in place on it’s foundation.
A seven-dish MeerKAT precursor array, KAT-7, is already complete. It is the world’s first radio telescope array consisting of composite antenna structures.
Tricom’s 25 ton steel frame or “back bone”, consisting of 6 600 individual parts, will provide the structure on which the dish rests and will also hold in place the other parts of the dish array, including the receiving indexer and the subreflector.
The first frame took two months to complete and was designed by US and German engineers and three of Tricom’s own engineers.
The dish, held up by the frame, will fit on to a monopole, which rests on a foundation. Inside the monopole, a nine ton motor will allow the dish to turn 180º in 1.3 seconds.
By the end of the month, the disassembled structure will be taken to the SKA site, 80km outside Carnarvon in the Northern Cape, and the design will be finalised after it is assembled and tested.
“Ninety-nine percent of the frame fit and worked the first time,” said Tricom director Shaka Sebola.
Two abnormal freight trucks and three superlink trucks (a truck with two trailers) are necessary to transport one back-up structure.
It is expected it will take six trained installers six days to complete the installation.
Once the first back-up structure is approved, Tricom Structures will manufacture up to three structures a month until the required frames for the 64 dishes of 13.5m diameter each, to the value of R680-million, are completed.
The commissioning of MeerKAT will take place this year and next, with the array coming online for science operations in 2016.
Sebola said once the process had been streamlined, they would have the capacity to build two structures simultaneously.
“Africa has sophistication in manufacturing often assumed not to exist here. This (building the frames) is evidence that the capabilities exist,” Sebola said.
The SKA, which will be a radio telescope, will make pictures from radio waves instead of seeing light waves.
Thousands of antennas, spread over 3 000km, will work together as one virtual instrument, creating a radio telescope 50 times more powerful and 10 000 times faster than any other currently in existence.
It is expected the SKA project will be completed in 2024.
SKA CAPABILITIES
l The data collected by the SKA in 24 hours would take 2 million years to play back on an iPod.
l Enough raw data will be recorded every day to fill a total of 15 million 64GB iPods.
l The SKA central computer will have the processing power of about 100 million personal computers.
l The SKA will use enough optical fibre to wrap around the earth twice.
l The dishes of the SKA will produce 10 times the current global internet traffic.
l The SKA will be so sensitive that it will be able to detect an airport radar on a planet 50 light years away. - Pretoria News