A stellar year for South Africa
The recent launch of the South African National Space Agency (SANSA) builds on decades of investments in space science and technology in South Africa. The agency will begin operating in April 2011, and will use both ground-based and satellite-borne platforms to operate in the areas of Earth observation, navigation and positioning, communications, and space science and exploration. South Africa's Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor said the primary purpose and policy driver of the space programme is to "leverage the benefits of space science and technology for socio-economic development". In addition to pursuing groundbreaking science, SANSA will aim at human capital development (developing rare and transferable skills in space science and engineering) and public engagement - nurturing awareness of and interest in science among the general public, especially the youth. The newly established SANSA will have a first chance to introduce itself to the global space community when South Africa hosts the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town, from 3 to 7 October 2011. The IAC is the most important event for the scientific and industrial community in the field, and will be an important opportunity for South Africa to showcase its scientific, institutional and industrial capabilities to the world. As this will be the first International Astronautical Congress on the African Continent, IAC 2011 will be a historic milestone in the development of the African space arena. This new space strategy complements South Africa's spectacular efforts in ground-based astronomy, culminating in its bid to host the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the largest radiotelescope ever conceived. The African bid to host the SKA is led by South Africa and includes eight partner countries (Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia), each of which will host some of SKA's 1,000 radio dishes. Construction is expected to begin in 2016 and be completed by 2025. The SKA will be 50 times more sensitive than any existing instrument, and will for the first time provide mankind with detailed pictures of the "dark ages" 13.7 billion years back in time. As a “pathfinder” radio telescope, South Africa is building the MeerKAT in Carnarvon, in the Northern Cape province. MeerKAT will be the Southern Hemisphere’s largest radio telescope - the country already already hosts the 10-metre diameter Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) the largest single optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. The MeerKAT team is now working on the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) a seven-dish prototype interferometer array in the Karoo region. The construction and commissioning of the full MeerKAT array (consisting of 80 dishes) will follow at the same site, and the telescope will be commissioned in 2013. The global astronomy community has already shown great interest in MeerKAT. The first five years of the MeerKAT’s life have already been allocated to 10 major international observing programmes. An important milestone was reached a few weeks ago with the "detection of fringes" in a joint very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observation. For the first time South Africa has completed the experiment without assistance from other countries. The 26m Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO) near Pretoria teamed up with one of the seven 12m dishes currently part of KAT-7 over 900 km away to jointly observe and record data from a distant radio source known as 3C273. The data was then correlated in Cape Town to produce the first ever African fringe detection at its first attempt. This is a proof of concepts of the kind of data integration which will happen on a daily basis with the SKA dishes. In addition, South African engineers have also built the building block for the next generation of digital processing systems that will be at the core of the SKA data processing. The reconfigurable open architecture computing hardware (ROACH) board is primarily a South African development and already in use in 300 high-tech facilities around the globe. However, ROACH-2 prototypes are much faster and more powerful. Developing large-scale astronomy facilities such as the MeerKAT and the SKA can become a powerful driver of socio-economic development in the region. The African SKA human-capital development programme has since 2005 awarded 293 grants for postgraduate and undergraduate study in physics, astronomy and engineering, as well as for technician and artisan training. It has created five research chairs at South African universities, and has spent about $15m on a human capital programme. The African SKA programme is attracting young people into science and engineering and training a new generation of highly qualified scientists, technicians and professionals. That is why the African Union endorsed the SKA bid at the 15th AU Summit of Heads of State in Uganda last year. In throwing its weight behind Africa‘s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array, the heads of state of the African Union stressed the SKA’s importance for the growth of science, technology and innovation in the region, and called on Africa‘s development partners and the global scientific community to support Africa’s bid. According to Bernie Fanaroff, project director of SKA South Africa, "in 2011 South Africa in conjunction with its eight African-partner countries bidding communally for the SKA will pull out all the stops to show the world that Africa is the future as far as science and technology are concerned”.
Countries
South Africa