Cape Town – South Africa would meet its deadline of completing the Meerkat radio telescope project – a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – by 2017, Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor said on Thursday.
“Our Meerkat will have 64 antennae and will increase from four dishes to 32 in the 2015/16 financial year and we will have completed the Meerkat by 2017,” Pandor said during a media briefing ahead of her budget vote in Parliament.
The Meerkat is being built in the Karoo, 90 kilometres outside of the Northern Cape town of Carnarvon.
The MeerKAT, with a further 190 antennas to be built on the same site, will make up the first phase of the mid-frequency component of the SKA.
The second phase of the SKA will see further mid frequency antennas constructed across South Africa and in eight African SKA partner countries.
“We’re very close to completing the observatory dish that we’ve put up in…Ghana and we are almost at a point of switch on,” Pandor said.
“We think by mid July we should be ready for it to begin to support researchers to do science.”
South Africa is co-hosting the SKA with Australia.
The SKA would eventually become the world’s largest radio telescope, and, according to scientists, was expected to map the history of the universe and answer some its mysteries.
ANA