Cape Town - SA has won the right to build the world’s largest scientific instrument – the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope – in Africa, but it will have to work “very hard” to implement it.
This was the warning from the director of SKA South Africa Dr Bernie Fanaroff. He pointed out that the massive international project would demand high-performance computing 1 000 times faster than the current generation of the most powerful super-computers, as well as new kinds of programming and infrastructure, such as a major source of electricity equivalent to a big power station.
He was speaking at a celebratory dinner for the project in the Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, attended by newly promoted Science and Technology Minister Derek Hanekom and outgoing minister Naledi Pandor, ahead of President Jacob Zuma’s visit to the SKA site.
The core central array of this 3 000-dish radio telescope is planned for an isolated site about 80km from the Karoo town, which is expected to get a substantial economic and social boost from the project.
SA has already built the seven-dish array KAT-7 pathfinder radio telescope at the site, and contractors are putting in the substantial infrastructure required for the much larger 64-dish MeerKAT instrument. The first antenna dish for MeerKAT is due to be installed at the end of next year or in early 2014.
MeerKAT had been designed as a stand-alone prototype for the SKA, but the latest planning will see it incorporated as part of phase one of the R17.2 billion international radio telescope project.
Fanaroff said he and Science and Technology Department director-general Dr Phil Mjwara had just arrived back from Australia, where they had attended a meeting of the board of the SKA Organisation, the international body that will manage the project.
“That board is really coming together now, and we got some good news – the Chinese state council, which is the highest decision-making body in China, has decided that it is going to throw its full weight into the SKA,” he said.
Also, Germany would be signing to join as a full member by the end of this month.
“This is a project that gets larger and larger as you look at it. Although we thought we were working very hard for the site bid, we’ve realised that was the easy part, and that implementation is the difficult part,” Fanaroff said.
“It’s not coming to us on a plate – we’re going to have to work very hard to implement it.
“I think the realisation has now come to people that this is a project that is much, much bigger than anything that has been built before.”
However, they were now also getting to grips with what was required.
“It’s really going to be a global effort, and we’re confident that we’re now on the road, the board is coming together, the project is looking much more mature than it was.
“We’re starting to get the commitments on the funding and we’re confident that by 2016 we’ll be ready to start construction.” - Cape Argus