On September 8 1966 Earth first made contact with the most famous split infinitive in the universe: ”To boldly go”. A decade after Star Trek hit the small screen South Africa finally joined the TV-watching world. Now the country is poised to challenge ”space, the final frontier”, to quote the series’s legendary voiceover.
The country will be invaded on two fronts: by the launch of South Africa’s second satellite, Sumbandila (TshiVenda for ”lead the way”), in December, and by the construction of a huge radio telescope in the Northern Cape.
On Thursday, the International Square Kilometre Array (SKA) steering committee in the Netherlands announced that South Africa and Australia have been shortlisted as sites for the SKA, a set of thousands of antennas with a core region 5km wide spread across one of the two continents. If South Africa wins, 50% of the â,¬1,5-billion project will be in the Karoo.
Put together, the dishes would cover a square kilometre. This network will be at least 50 times more powerful than any telescope yet built in the world.
A final decision on the bids will be made in 2008, but no matter the result, South Africa will build the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT), a world-class instrument that will be 1% of the size of the SKA, on the site where it proposes to build the bigger instrument.
KAT project manager Anita Loots described the SKA bid as the ”World Cup of science”, with the winning country able to reap the benefits for 50 years, not just for the four weeks of the soccer equivalent.
In a statement, Minister of Science and Technology Mosibudi Mangena said the news that South Africa had made the shortlist was ”a great step” for local scientific endeavour.
Mangena said the SKA was the only instrument that could solve the basic questions of the origins of the universe and the birth and evolution of stars and galaxies. It is expected to solve the problem of the ”dark energy”, which has recently been found to fill the universe, and will test Einstein’s theory of general relativity with greater precision than any existing instrument.
In addition to its huge establishment cost, the SKA will cost â,¬150-million a year to run. Tax- payers can rest easy — this money will come from international funding, although the South African government has promised R350-million for the building of KAT.
KAT, the SKA bid and SumbandilaSat were the talking points of the department of science and technology’s International Science, Innovation and Technology Exhibition (Insite) in Sandton this week.
Sumbandila is a low-Earth- orbiting micro-satellite, weighing 81kg, that will be launched from a submarine in Severemorsk, Russia, between December 20 and 25, depending on the weather.
The main payload is a remote sensing camera that can generate satellite imagery at 6,25m ground sampling distance (the area represented by each pixel in an image). Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Derek Hanekom said the satellite imagery would support decision-making in areas such at natural resource management, disaster management, agriculture and urban planning.
Also on board are a telecommunications system funded by the department of communications and five experimental payloads from academic institutions. The universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Stellenbosch and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan and the Amateur Radio Association want information on low-frequency radio waves, radiation, software-defined radio, forced vibrating string and radio amateur transponders. Beam me up, Scotty.
The telescope teams will be hoping Sumbandila is parked far from the Karoo. One of the major pluses for the Northern Cape’s SKA bid is that the sparsely populated area has a low level of radio interference. Cellphone masts, radio and television broadcast towers and satellites are among the biggest bugbears for those trying to decode the information coming in from space.
With the Southern African Large Telescope (Salt) recently opened at Sutherland, the region is set to become one of the world’s major centres for fundamental physics, astronomy and high-tech engineering, which would attract some of the best scientists and engineers in the world, said Mangena.
Professor Justin Jonas, the project scientist for the SKA in South Africa, was delighted by the news that the country’s bid had made the short list ahead of China and Argentina. He stressed that South Africa should make use of its geographical advantage in terms of being able to link directly to radio telescopes on all the other continents.
”If the SKA comes to Southern Africa, suddenly we will be the site of a premier scientific instrument,” he said. ”It would be a massive shot in the arm for science and technology in the subcontinent.”
Geek speak
Listening to the scientists discussing technical specifications for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and Karoo Array Telescope (KAT), Julia Beffon felt a bit like George W Bush.
In a joke currently doing the rounds, Donald Rumsfeld goes into the Oval Office to give the president the latest casualty statistics from Iraq. ”A Brazilian was killed today,” he tells his boss.
Dubya looks devastated: ”Oh no, that’s awful,” he cries. ”Er, how many’s a brazillion?”
There weren’t many Brazilians running around the Sandton Convention Centre this week, but the International Science, Innovation and Technology Exhibition (Insite) was populated by several other strange beasts, some still at the mythical stage.
If South Africa wins the right to build the SKA, the computing power required to link up the thousand antenna dishes in the Karoo with others in Kenya, Namibia, Botswana, Madagascar, Mozambique, Mauritius and Ghana will be measured in petaflops. That’s machines capable of performing a quadzillion (1015) calculations a second. Oh, and they need to talk to each other at data transmission speeds measured in terabits. That’s a million-million (1012) bits a second.
The most powerful computers in the world today are still working in the 0,3 petaflop range. But, because the SKA will take nearly 15 years to build, the scientists behind the project are confident that petaflops and terabits will be as common as apples and windows by the time the giant telescope comes on line.
More worrying is the enormous amount of electricity required to run and cool this extraordinary instrument. With its nerve centre housed in Cape Town, the SKA will have very few personnel at the Karoo site. So hundreds of kilometres of optical fibre cable will be needed to transmit the information gathered.
With government agencies’ full backing, the SKA and KAT projects will be able to ensure power from Eskom and an area relatively free of radio interference — the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa will block the proliferation of cellphone masts.
A major difference is that South Africa will not be working alone this time. Scientists from 17 countries are cooperating on the SKA project, with images from the telescope eventually instantly available via the internet. Bring on the brazillions …