The\u00a0Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), an international radio telescope project, is helping boost capacity for space science across Africa. South Africa, the host of the mid-frequency radio telescope, is benefitting immensely.<\/p>\n
The observatory<\/a> project is helping build capacity and interest in space science, one of the least common branches of the sciences in Africa. The continent produces the least percentage of the world\u2019s scientific knowledge at about 2 per cent.<\/p>\n Jointly hosted by the governments of South Africa under the\u00a0South African Radio Astronomy Observatory<\/a>\u00a0(SARAO) and Australia, and designed to be the largest project of its kind in the world, the scientific endeavour has seen the number of people specialised in astronomy grow in South Africa from less than five to more than 200 since 2017, when the first satellite dishes were erected on the project site in the Karoo desert<\/a>.<\/p>\n Besides, it has issued 1,700 scholarships in different branches of space sciences to undergraduate students, with 80-90 per cent completion rates recorded for both.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have managed to grow the capacity for astronomy in South Africa to between 200 and 300 people from only a handful a few years ago. About 20 years ago, there were only about four people specialising in astronomy in South Africa,\u201d said Adrian Tiplady, SARAO\u2019s deputy managing director.<\/p>\n He added that 162 South African scientists were directly participating in \u201cSKA science\u201d at the moment, thanks to capacity building initiatives by the international project, including in engineering and in a range of \u201cinnovative technologies\u201d, among them design satellite dishes.<\/p>\n In hosting the mid-frequency telescope, South Africa is also collaborating with eight African countries including Kenya, Ghana, Madagascar, Mauritius and Zambia. The other collaborators are neighbours Botswana, Mozambique and Namibia.<\/p>\n The countries have been benefiting from skill development in radio astronomy from SKA, including through the Transient Array Radio Telescope\u00a0(TART) \u2014\u00a0an open-source, 24-element \u2018interferometer\u2019, said the official.<\/p>\n Ghana is leading in building its capacity among the partner countries, having converted a 32-metre redundant satellite telecommunications antenna at Kuntunse, near the capital Accra, into a functioning radio telescope, besides launching the Ghana Radio Astronomy Observatory in 2017, and conducting \u201cfirst light\u201d observations.<\/p>\n Kenya, on the other hand, has made some progress providing training in basic astrophysics and radio astronomy to students and professionals through the Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) project. This is besides establishing a site as a radio astronomy observatory in the Rift Valley region.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have achieved many developments that are not being reported. For example, we have discovered a new giant radio galaxy, 32 times bigger than the size of the Milky way galaxy,\u201d Tiplady told a media briefing during a project site tour.<\/p>\n The project was providing the environment suitable for maximising \u201cthe development of radio science\u201d, leveraging on new ways of designing radio telescopes using non-conventional dishes to produce the \u201cbest signals,\u201d Tiplady added.<\/p>\n \u201cThe nature of the radio telescope is that it is always expandable, always being expanded in a phased approach. This project has the potential for data intensive science, in searching the origins of the universe,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n The SKA-Mid (mid-frequency), as the South African telescope is known, is one of two telescopes that the SKAO is building. Its counterpart, the SKA-Low<\/a> \u2014 which will consist of 131,072 antennas receiving low-frequency radio waves \u2014 is under construction in Wajarri, Australia.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the observatory\u2019s growing telescope array, has achieved<\/a> \u201cfirst fringes\u201d using two of its dishes, a milestone that could demonstrate it as operating as an \u2018interferometer\u2019 for the first time.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the first true test that all our systems are working together, and that the SKA-Mid telescope is alive as a scientific instrument,\u201d said SKAO Director-General Philip Diamond.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving each dish observe the sky individually is an achievement, but having them operate in concert as one telescope is a much bigger technical challenge, and our teams have now achieved that milestone.\u201d<\/p>\n The observatory, like its counterpart Australia\u2019s SKA-Low, is an array where many individual antennas are connected by optical fibre to act like one much larger telescope, equivalent in size to the distance between its furthest antennas. \u201cFringes\u201d are obtained when signals received by two or more antennas are combined successfully.<\/p>\n Two of SKA-Mid\u2019s 15-metre diameter dishes were used together to achieve the result, observing a radio galaxy estimated to be around 2.6 billion light years away.<\/p>\n \u201cThis source has been well studied so we know what the signal should look like, and that\u2019s what we observed with this first fringes result. It confirms that all our hardware and software systems are working as we designed them to do, giving us confidence as we begin to commission the telescope,\u201d said Betsey Adams, SARAO\u2019s commissioning scientist.<\/p>\n \u201cThat includes seeing that the dishes can track across the sky in a coordinated way under the control of the telescope manager software, the receivers are being cooled to the required temperature of minus 250\u00b0C, the synchronisation and timing system is accurately timing signals from the different dishes to a billionth of a second, and the correlator is correctly processing and aligning the data.\u201d<\/p>\n The observatory now has seven dish structures assembled on site at the Karoo, with a further 12 on their way from the manufacturers CETC54 in China.<\/p>\n When complete, the telescope will comprise 197 dishes, including the integration of the existing MeerKAT radio telescope built and operated by SARAO, the agency said on January 7.<\/p>\n The SKA-Mid telescope is being built and will be operated by the SKA in collaboration with SARAO and international partners including 16 partner countries. These include Canada in North America, and the European countries of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, with India, China and Japan being the only Asian participants.<\/p>\n The SKA-Mid will comprise 197 dishes when complete. This will include the dishes of the existing Meerkart telescope<\/a>, a precursor \u00a0to SKA-Mid, built and operated by SARAO, and which has \u00a0been operational since 2018, a world-class telescope in its own right.<\/p>\n The telescope, originally a 64-dish array, has recently been extended by another 14, financed by SARAO, Germany\u2019s Max Planck Society and Italy\u2019s National Institute of Astrophysics, all of which are partners in the SKAO. All of the MeerKAT dishes will ultimately be integrated into the SKA-Mid telescope.<\/p>\n The newer MeerKAT dishes follow the SKA-Mid dish design of 15m diameter, compared to 13.5m for its original dishes, and are also slightly different. All the hardware and software for SKA-Mid is being developed in member countries<\/a> globally.<\/p>\n Also present on the site is the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array<\/a> (HERA) telescope, a separate international collaboration, led by America\u2019s University of California, Berkeley, and built by local artisans in the Karoo. It will however not form part of SKA-Mid.<\/p>\n According to a 2020 article<\/a> published in the journal Springer Nature Link by Simon T Berry, in addition to the observatory building the research capacity development aspects of the programme, South Africa and collaborating African countries will benefit in skills development, and reap \u201cconsiderable social-economic benefits\u201d, by participating at the forefront of the SKAO.<\/p>\n \u201cSpin-off innovations in areas specific to the SKA\u2019s computing activities will, through the industries with which SKA will be working to develop them, benefit other systems that process large volumes of data from geographically dispersed sources. Potential areas where innovations inspired by the SKA\u2019s needs could have wider applicability include data management techniques, data mining and analytics, imaging algorithms, remote visualisation and pattern matching (all of which will have impact in areas such as medicine, transport and security),\u201d it found.<\/p>\n These would be in line with the African Union\u2019s STI Strategy for Africa<\/a> (STISA-2024) strategy, a key pillar of the Union\u2019s Agenda 2063<\/a>, which aims to unlock innovation-led growth, create jobs, and enhance industrialisation.<\/p>\n Overall, the observatory is already detecting more objects in greater detail than before including the Cosmos gravitational waves and the galaxy according to Tiplady, having detected 85 known galaxies so far.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are now able to detect these objects because we are able to digitise data quickly, even if the amount of data that needs to be explained is so much,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The\u00a0Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), an international radio telescope project, is helping boost capacity for space science across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[972,85,46,138301,138302,141,9517,145,29976],"class_list":{"0":"post-263670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-karoo-desert","12":"tag-sarao","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-south-africa","15":"tag-space","16":"tag-telescope"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}