Cape Town - The negotiations and the bidding are over – now the hard work of detailed planning for the final design of the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope has started in earnest.
And South Africans are at the heart of a unique team involving more than 350 of the world’s top engineers, scientists and astronomers from close to 100 leading institutions, universities and companies in 18 countries who have been selected to work together over the next three years to make the world’s largest radio telescope a reality.
Professor John Womersley, chairman of the SKA board, explained that the multi-disciplinary team of experts now had three years to come up with the best technological solutions for the final design of the telescope, “so that we can start tendering for construction of the first phase in 2017 as planned”. When fully operational – phase one will run until about 2023 and the main SKA will only be constructed from about 2024 – its thousands of antennas in three unique configurations will enable astronomers to monitor space in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky thousands of times faster than any system now in existence.
Located mainly in Africa but with about 20 percent in Australia and New Zealand, the telescope will have an image resolution quality 50 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope and will help answer some of humankind’s greatest questions – such as the nature of dark energy, the formation of the universe and whether life exists elsewhere.
Earlier this year, the UK-based parent body, SKA Organisation, sent invitations to research organisations and industry partners around the globe, asking them to participate in the three-year detailed design phase.
This request for proposals included a conceptual design of the telescope that is described as “a global endeavour and one of the largest and most ambitious scientific projects in history”, as well as statements of all the work required and a breakdown of how this work could be structured.
As with construction of other projects of this magnitude, such as the Large Hadron Collider and major space programmes, the SKA has been broken down into “work packages”, with each being managed by a consortium of international experts.
This week, the SKA board announced the 10 teams that would undertake these work packages.
One of the work packages is “infrastructure (including power)”, divided between Africa and Australia. Engineer Tracy Cheetham, pictured, of SKA-South Africa, the project manager for the team preparing the major SKA site near Carnarvon in the Northern Cape, will lead “INFRA-SA Consortium” which will be responsible for all work – like roads, buildings, power generation and distribution, reticulation, vehicles, cranes and specialist equipment in South Africa and at the sites in its eight African partners.
The “assembly, integration and verification” package that includes the planning for all activities at the remote sites – many of the approximately 3 000 antennas of the telescope will be scattered across the continent – is being led by Richard Lord of SKA South Africa’s Pinelands office.
Professor Phil Diamond, the director-general of the SKA Organisation, said: “That we’ve been able to pull together a team of some of the world’s best experts, most prestigious institutions and major companies reflects the passion and ambition of the scientific and engineering communities.” - Cape Argus