Having studied astronomy for a number of years at university, this is a subject that is very close to my heart, and South Africa is in a good spot right now. We have a good climate for astronomy, one of the world’s largest ground-based optical telescopes (SALT out in Sutherland), a magnetic observatory in Hermanus, and several other smaller observatories.
That all is old news though. More exciting things are still to come. South Africa are bidding to build what will be the largest radio telescope array in the world, and our only competition are the Australians.
This radio telescope, called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will be made up of 3000 radio dishes, each of which is 3 stories high. Think of something similar to the Very Large Array (VLA) out in New Mexico that featured in the movie Contact. Except the VLA comprises only 27 dishes. Now, granted, each dish in the SKA will be smaller than the ones in the VLA, with 3000 of them working together, nothing before it will compare.
The name of the telescope comes not from the size of the area on which the telescopes will be built, but rather, the combined surface area of the dishes, which will be spread out over an enormous area. If we get the bid, most of the dishes will be built in the Northern Cape, with 7 other neighbouring countries also having a few dishes, since the full scale will be 3000km across.
The reason for this is that when you use several radio telescopes far apart from each other, you can get much better resolution than having one big giant dish. I won’t go into the technical details of how this works since I would probably lose 99% of my readers doing that. Suffice to say, what we are essentially creating here is a huge radio telescope 3000km across that is made up of 3000 individual bits, all connected by fiber optics.
And what would be the price tag for this project? Only a paltry two billion euros. It sounds a lot, but when you compare to what you are trying to do, it doesn’t sound like much.
I think South Africans need to come forward and be proud that we are being considered. Come on show your support.
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