How were black holes created? How did the first stars come into existence? These – and other questions we haven’t thought of yet – may well be answered by the world’s most sophisticated telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The decision about whether this new telescope will be located in the Northern Cape is to be taken in 2012.

South Africa is bidding against Australia to host the R14.5-billion radio telescope, with the South Africans aiming to build it on a huge site near Carnarvon. The size and scope of the project means that winning the bid will have significant economic implications for the province.

The speed of the computers that will operate at SKA will be so fast as to defy belief. Dr Bernie Fanaroff, director, South Africa SKA Project, says, ‘SKA is expected to collect more data in one week than humankind has collected in its entire history.’ Mankind will have its first clear pictures of what the universe looked like 13.7 billion years ago.

Bidding for the ambitious project has already created considerable benefits for astronomy in South Africa. In the first phase, a single dish (XDM) was built at Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) near Pretoria. By 2010, the seven dishes required for the second phase of the project (KAT-7) had been built in the Karoo. Commissioning of these dishes will be complete by June 2011 while scientific verification will go on into 2012.

MeerKAT is the final phase of the local project. This will entail 64 dishes being established in the Karoo, with the first to be in place by 2013 and the project to be complete by the end of 2016. The intention is that MeerKAT will develop technologies appropriate to the SKA. This will include the use of composite, one-piece reflectors, single-pixel wideband receivers, low-cost, high-reliability cryogenic systems, and reconfigurable digital processing systems.

In early 2011, South Africa’s scientists gave notice that they are ready to host SKA. For the first time South Africa was able to complete a joint very long baseline interferomtry (VLBI) observation without any international assistance. An experiment involving the ‘detection of fringes’ saw the HartRAO combine with one of the KAT-7 dishes to observe and record data from a radio source known as 3C273, which is very far away from earth. This data was then successfully correlated in Cape Town.

Another step in the preparation of the field for SKA is in computing systems. South Africans have helped create the building block for the next generation of digital-processing systems. Known as ROACH (reconfigurable open architecture computing hardware), the board is in use in 300 facilities internationally. It is thought that the technology will hold good for many years, allowing for future versions of ROACH to be developed using the same platform but achieving ever-greater efficiencies.

An announcement by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in October 2010 served to give another boost to South Africa’s bid chances: the CSIR gave notice that a R100-million second network, with speeds of 10 gigabytes a second, would be installed at the astronomy site in the course of 2011. Neotel will install the network in partnership with Broadband Infraco. The existing astronomical facilities at Sutherland will also benefit from this faster network.

National context
A conference on astronomy heard in 2010 that two-thirds of the population of the United States cannot see the Milky Way, so polluted is that country’s night sky. For astrological research, the Northern Cape’s central Karoo district, with its ‘quiet skies’, is ideal.

National government took the unusual step of legislating to ensure that it stays ideal by passing the Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act in 2008. South African and international researchers already have a considerable presence just outside the town of Sutherland.

Astrological tourism has already created good economic spinoffs. Two Sutherland entrepreneurs rehabilitated the conservation land around the SALT facility, which has now become the site of guided tours and accommodation venues have flourished in recent times. A satellite visitors’ centre will be built in the township of Schietfontein.

SALT at Sutherland
One of the 10 existing telescopes at Sutherland is the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) which has a hexagonal mirror array that measures 11m across. This is the largest facility of its type in the southern hemisphere and one of the top 10 in the world.

SALT is an international collaboration that includes scientists and academics in Germany, India, Poland, the UK and the USA. It allows astronomers to examine the scale and age of the universe, the life and deaths of stars and the earliest galaxies. The telescope is situated at an altitude of 1 759m.
Southern African Large Telescope: www.salt.ac.za

Online resources
Hoogland Tourism: www.karoohoogland.co.za
SKA South Africa Project: www.ska.ac.za
South African Astronomical Observatory: www.saao.ac.za
Southern African Large Telescope: www.salt.ac.za